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swallowtail-ageha · 1 month ago

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8, 9, and 10 for whatever fandom you choose!

Oh putting this under a cut because this is getting LONG

8- Common fandom opinion everyone is wrong about

The idea that "Robert was actually a good man during the rebellion and just became mean later :((( he was a paragon of a man who then decayed!"

It is more popular on reddit than here, thank god, but i fucking hate it. I hate it so much. I hate that they are blaming his abuse victim (cersei) for him being an abuser even though no one forced him to beat his own son who was a small child so badly that stannis thought he DIED because said son was imitating the violent behavior of his father. Cersei didn't force robert to fuck mia stone's mother and people who think "well he whored but it doesn't mean that he was bad!!" are just clearly missing the point that the story (through lyanna's comment to ned) was trying to make and that no. The seeds of him being like he was in AGOT were always there.

And also :) i don't think you can call a "sad tragic gigachad who turned evil because of his bitch wife" :) a man who canonically raped and impregnated a THIRTEEN YEAR OLD.

I am sorry i know this is disconnected as fuck. I hate robert stans so much like genuinely. The amount of rape apology between his stans sickens me.

9- Worst part of canon, Evillious Chronicles

God i know. I know its just rambling with no goal because you arent in evichro but i just hate everything about the OSS:Crime novel. Its just. Eugh.

Everyone is actually written in such a mean-spirited way its hard to get attached to them. I hate the stupid fucking "actually the drug didnt work on eve and she was aware and also somehow she and adam are separated at birth twins even though it actively retcons their previously established ages" so much i actively routinely forget that it is a thing. I hate how Meta and apocalypse are general is given very little spotlight despite them being extremely decisive in changing the course of the story and when they are highlighted again they are written in such a shoddy disinterested and mean spirited way you cannot get interested in them

Literally the only good thing about that novel is that it confirmed adam/seth as a father-son incest ship and it caused a meltdown so big that all their shippers (who were also the biggest group of antis who went on to harass other fans) abandoned the fandom it was glorious to watch slowly unfold

10- Worst part of fanon

Dark Souls

Oooooh i have such a big bone to pick with the "gwyn took priscilla as a child sex slave and gwyndolin is the result of that" theory which plagues reddit like its pubic lice.

It just. Sucks. Its fans suck because at every fucking second either priscilla, gwyndolin or gwyn get mentioned they'll love to scream "GWYN BRUTALLY RAPED A CHILD" and literally all of the supposed evidences are translations that are nitpicked. You'd expect that if gwyn truly was prime epstein as this theory wants to tell us, that fromsoft would put more clues of it that aren't discovered by nitpicking and ketamine abuse and that the theory as a whole would be known by the jp fandom but from what i have seen there is zero content on that. Nada. And also that fromsoft wouldn't portray as an extremely tragic figure to be pitied and understood mr gwyn "i rape babies for breakfast" lordofsunlight. But what do i know. I am not enlightened as sabaku no maiku or mirko or lokey lore or whatever italian weeb who wants to look like an authority sooo badly they'll machine translate and write their names in badly spelled japanese or whatever. Fustigate me in the public square i guess

I wouldnt be so pissy about it if its fans wouldnt tout it as the true real canon and treat it as what it is, their fanfictions (which also. Really dont make sense motivation wise. If gwyn thought of gwyndolin as his secret and abominable why wouldnt he just let him be in the painting instead of bothering to pull him out, shun him, and force him to be raised as a girl so he wouldn't inherit the throne?

Bloodborne

I hate how the fandom lowkey seems scared to have their characters be actually. Bad people. You know?

The entire toxic waste that are maria hardcore fans, but also shit like silly little fella weak victorian child micolash, bear daddy knight ludwig, hyperfeminized hysterical twink laurence, golden retriever alfred (even though he literally beat a woman to a bloody pulp), adeline who only serves as maria's cottagecore sad girlfriend, brador and djura which oh my god one of the bnf's interpretation of them is so atrocious and yet popular they do not even seem like they are middle aged men but 2020 quarantined american teenagers. Wont speak about rom and caryll because they might as well be inexistent at large in fandom. Gehrman is the only one who is allowed to be a bad person but also only to exonerate maria from every bad act she did and because older man/younger woman is gross and predatory (but also somehow gehrman/laurence with laurence (which is a ship i actually really like lol) being portrayed as way younger than gehrman too isn't because lulz toxic yaoi).

Every character is twisted and deformed from being all interesting and twisted (aside from the ugly old man who is the devil himself) in their own right to be into little neat fandom popular tropes, which i guess it is normalcy for every fandom, but for bloodborne its so egregious you'd think the fan content isnt for a cosmic horror story but for a bnha spin off.

#thanks for the ask!#bloodborne #dark souls #evillious chronicles #asoiaf #bwahahaha i am a lot more virulent than usual (which is a LOT) but robertcourse brings that out of me i guess lol #for the bb thing it might be inaccurate now because 1) i dont go on the tags anymore and just interact w my mutuals #and 2) i have all the worst offenders of it blocked (or they have blocked me lmao)

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justforbooks · 5 months ago

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The Party by Tessa Hadley

The author’s novella about two young women whose yearning for freedom comes at a price sometimes feels unconvincing and underpowered

While Tessa Hadley’s The Party began its life as a New Yorker short story, it seems that it wouldn’t, for her, go away. At some point she found herself moved to continue the narrative, and so it became the first of the three chapters of what is now a novella. In my mind, these chapters resemble the mirrors you might find sitting on top of an old-fashioned dressing table, each one providing a different angle, sometimes lovely and sometimes unexpectedly ugly, for the person (the reader) who happens to be gazing into them. The book begins with a party, after all: noses must be powdered, and lips carefully blotted. Only later does anyone notice that the hair on the back of a head has unaccountably become matted, that smudged mascara has darkened pale cheeks.

The dishevelment in this story comes courtesy of two men: the sinisterly named Sinden and his friend Paul. At a party in an old boozer in the Bristol docks some time after the war (the Malayan emergency is under way, so we’re talking 1948 or later), these two are loitering rather hungrily when Evelyn, who’s reading French at university, arrives to meet her older and more sophisticated sister, Moira, a fashion student. As the night wears on, neither girl is taken with either of these blokes particularly, but a certain boredom and competitiveness induces them first to drink with them and then to run away from them. Better to get the bus home, they think, than to accept Sinden’s self-proclaimed attempt at “abduction”, however jocular.

But as Moira wisely notes, it’s impossible to get away from “that kind of man”. She and Evelyn survive the party, with its warm gin and undrinkable cider, but Sinden and Paul are playing a longer game, one made all the more easy to win by the sisters’ circumstances. Oh, but the stultification of home! Their parents’ marriage is fractious and fraying. Their science-mad little brother, Ned, is a pest. Both are full of longing: Evelyn for a man she has yet to meet, and Moira for one who’s otherwise entangled. No wonder, then, that when the phone rings at supper time one Wednesday evening, they’re apt to accept the invitation it heralds.

And who, in any case, is going to forbid them this? The finer delineations of class streak this book like the rivulets of water that run down the steamed-up windows when their mother cooks Sunday lunch. The sisters’ putative “friends” Sinden and Paul live in smart Sneyd Park, where they’ve been asked to play mahjong. How nice! Though their father heard a male voice when he picked up the receiver, the man on the other end of the line sounded self-assured. “Don’t spoil your sister’s evening,” he admonishes Evelyn, when she briefly hesitates, suddenly feeling that she’d rather stay at home with Andromache.

In the end, then, Evelyn and Moira do find themselves in a far-off big house, enfolded awkwardly by its posh, rather affected young inhabitants (one of them is called Podge), and over the course of a night, innocence is exchanged for (anti-climactic) experience. What happens, about which I shouldn’t say more here, is moderately shocking in context – though not, perhaps, for the reasons Hadley imagines. I argue somewhat with her notion of the risks middle class young women at the back end of the 1940s might be willing to take in the pursuit of freedom. However, the greater problem by far when it comes to the story’s denouement is her decision to tie up the tale neatly with a bow. Why spell out so explicitly that this night changes Evelyn and Moira? Such emphasis undercuts all that has happened, as if Hadley is suddenly anxious her story has too little weight.

But perhaps she’s right to be worried. I’ve always loved Hadley’s books, her earlier novels (The London Train, Clever Girl) particularly; at her best, she has something of Elizabeth Taylor about her (there is no higher praise). More recently, though, something new has crept into her writing: a self-consciousness that has her overstuffing her sentences with adjectives (“the small, slack breasts with their dark spreading nipples were derisory, insulting”) even as she’s happy to deploy cliches (here, she writes of bombed-out Bristol’s “broken-toothed skyline”).

It has, I think, to do with her move backwards in time: she’s so much less comfortable as a writer in the past than in the near-present, and in this book, as in her previous novel, Free Love, the historical details are often unconvincing, too generic truly to be felt. If the story’s more shocking events strain for effect, so do the quotidian details: the laboured descriptions of clothes, music and (especially) food. The novella’s scantness should deceive; it is a form whose punch should feel disproportionate, even a little dangerous (think of Mary Gaitskill or Claire Keegan). But this one is too slight, and too underpowered: a strangely watered-down thing, not heady enough even to leave you with the whisper of a hangover.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #Tessa Hadley #The Party #book review

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adamwatchesmovies · 10 months ago

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20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)

When you hear the words “Classic Disney”, your mind immediately jumps to the studio's many animated films but have you ever taken a peek at some of the live-action works in the library? 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a wonderful adventure, full of memorable characters and terrific special effects. It perfectly captures the thrill and imagination of the novel by Jules Verne, making it splendid entertainment for the young and old.

In 1868, a series of disasters in the Pacific Ocean lead the nations of the world to believe a sea monster prowls the waters. While investigating, Professor Aronnax (Paul Lukas), his assistant, Conseil (Peter Lorre) and master harpooner Ned Land (Kirk Douglas) discover the monster is actually a man-made “submerging boat”. The Nautilus is responsible for these attacks and now, the men are prisoners/guests of its captain: Nemo (James Mason).

Those who’ve already seen the film probably remember it best for a spectacular sequence during the second half. The Nautilus is deep underwater when a giant squid attacks. Generally, the illusions used to bring the Nautilus to life are quite good but in this scene, you’ll wonder how director Richard Fleischer pulled it off. I’m sure that inevitably, we’ll get a big-budget remake (or rather, another adaptation) of the novel and when we do, I wonder if the matching scene will have the same impact as this one. Sure it will look slick thanks to modern special effects but here? You can tell the people are actually struggling against the water, the wind and the physical animatronic.

This is a great-looking picture. The Technicolor process makes even mundane objects like the sailor's red hats pop and underwater footage has never looked better. There’s a scene that shows how Nemo and his crew harvest the sea bed for food. It isn't crucial to the story, but the footage is so clear no editor in their right mind would ever dream of cutting it. Seeing the men in their deep-sea suits gathering seaweed, using nets to calmly wrangle a school of fish or guide a sea turtle is nothing short of breathtaking because you know those are real people and real animals being filmed. I'm certain more than one oceanographer could tell you that scene is what made them choose their career because they saw it as a kid. The wonders aren’t limited to the outside either. The interior of the Nautilus is a wonderful place full of ndetails that will make you fall in love with the aesthetic of steampunk (even though technically, the submarine is nuclear-powered).

But ultimately, all of these visual flairs wouldn’t mean much if it weren’t for a great story and most importantly, great characters. Captain Nemo is such a compelling… hero? villain? anti-hero? On the one hand, he seems sympathetic. All he wants is to be left alone so he and his crew can keep living on the ocean. Then, you remember that to ensure his solitude, he indiscriminately attacks whatever vessels get too close. He is technically keeping the Professor, Conseil and Ned prisoner but the very fact that he didn’t just kill them shows how classy a guy he is. Much credit is to due to the extremely charismatic James Mason. Long stretches of the film simply concern day-to-day life aboard the Nautilus and Conseil and Ned's attempts to escape - the Professor being (understandably) too mesmerized by everything around him to bother. That sounds like it could be boring but it never is. In fact, this is the kind of movie you hope never ends.

If there’s one aspect of 20,000 Leagues that might not have aged as well as the rest, it’s a brief sequence where Nemo allows Ned and Conseil above sea level to explore an island. He warns them that cannibals live there. In real life, there have never been cannibal societies and the myth has racist connotations. Ned and Conseil do, in fact, encounter hostile natives, though whether these are actual cannibals could be up for debate, as mounting skulls on pikes as a warning against intruders is something many societies have done and both men suspect Nemo just said there were cannibals to discourage them from wandering too far. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.

1954’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea has aged surprisingly well. The special effects are excellent and the underwater photography is crystal-clear - something even modern blockbusters struggle with. It’s a thrilling adventure that captures the imagination thanks to the source material by Jules Verne - faithfully adapted by Earl Felton - and director Richard Fleischer, who keeps the pace consistent despite the episodic nature of the story. Best of all, it features an excellent and memorable performance by James Mason. How good he is cannot be understated. This is a new favorite for me. (August 9, 2022)

#20 000 leagues under the sea #movies #films #movie reviews #film reviews #Richard Fleischer #Earl Felton #Jules Verne #Kirk Douglas #James Mason #Paul Lukas #Peter Lorre #1954 movies #1954 films

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traincat · 4 years ago

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Disregard my last ask because the latest issue raised a troubling question that I, as a black man, feel the need to clarify with you, a woman. That whole whole Ned Leeds/Betty Brant business is sexual assault via deception right? Like you know more about Clones and Spider-Man 616 than I but I feel like that’s besides the point because it happened to Betty. She is carrying the child of whom she thought was her dead ex-husband. And Ned clone has to know he is a clone. He has to know. Unlike Ben and Kaine, he has the awareness and information of the Jackal and the awareness of his progenitor’s death.

Or am I reaching too far and reading too far into things?

I'm glad you came back and asked this specific question because it's definitely something I have a lot of thoughts on, and I’m glad you asked my thoughts on it as a woman because I think this is one of those comic book storylines that’s hard for me to divorce that fact from -- the fact that I’m a woman definitely plays into how I view this storyline specifically and how it effects me, in ways I don’t think were necessarily intended by some of the writers involved in its ongoing arc who were not looking at things from the same perspective I’m coming at them from. I definitely don't think you're reaching or reading too far into things -- I think that is what's being presented on the page, albeit likely without authorial intent. Just as like a general disclaimer, I'm not closely following Spencer's run for the sheer reason that I'm not enjoying it very much, although I'm aware of the general directions it's taking through friends and social media. But I actually think this Betty/Ned issue goes back pretty far.

First things first, I think Clone Conspiracy really wreaked havoc on how Spider-Man as a series has always handled clones. Pre-Clone Conspiracy, there was a very clear clone narrative going on: clones are their own person, they are not direct copies or replacements of the original. You see this with Ben Reilly and you see it with the Gwen Stacy clones. Clones are treated as their own individuals, even if they have to struggle to get to that point -- there's even an issue of Spider-Man Unlimited where Ben and Betty go on a date. Betty doesn't know that Ben is Peter's clone -- he's introduced as his cousin -- and they both reflect on how you can't go back to the way things were. So even though Ben has all of Peter's memories regarding his initial romance with Betty, the narrative makes it clear that Ben and Betty cannot recapture that connection or that exact relationship.

Here's where Clone Conspiracy changed everything, in my opinion for the worse: Clone Conspiracy's clone narrative is that these clones are, essentially, the original person. I believe the Marvel wiki still actually lists the end of Clone Conspiracy as 616 Gwen Stacy's issue of death instead of Amazing Spider-Man #121, because Clone Conspiracy treated that Gwen not simply as a clone with all of the same memories, but as essentially Gwen resurrected through a cloning process. The Billy Connors who was cloned is treated as the same Billy Connors who was killed by his father in Shed (Amazing Spider-Man #630-633). And the clone Ned is treated as the same as 616 Ned. This is a mess, to put it simply, because it goes against all the previous Spider-Man cloning narratives and, honestly, most popular sci-fi clone narratives, and it's seriously undermining decades of good Spider-Man storytelling in ways that Slott didn't address and that Spencer seems unwilling to. It probably wouldn't have been a very big deal -- a frustrating one, but not a big one -- if all of the clones had perished at the end of Clone Conspiracy, but they didn't. Billy Connors escaped, and it's immensely frustrating to me to see Peter treating the Connors family reunion as something he can tolerate when Curt Connors ate his kid, and the Ned clone slithered away in the gutters to, I assume, spite me personally.

Which brings us to the current Betty Brant storyline in Amazing Spider-Man, where Betty has showed up heavily pregnant and informed Peter that the child is Ned's.

Yeah, I would say this is in fact the worst possible part. (ASM (2018) #67) Just speaking for myself, I'm generally not anti-pregnancy or baby storylines in comics, but this one is making me very uncomfortable for reasons beside Spencer being apparently unable to find any way to fit Betty into his stories without her showing pregnant.

So I'm actually going to take this back way, way to when Betty and Ned first got married, with some explanation of who Ned Leeds is for the uninformed, because, especially with the MCU's Ned Leeds in the mix, he's not exactly the world's most well known Spider-Man character. (I’m sure @ubernegro, who is much more well read on Miles Morales’ canon than I am, has thoughts on how the MCU’s Ned borrowed heavily off the character of Ganke Lee with a 616 Peter Parker character’s name pasted over him.) Ned was initially introduced as Peter's competition for Betty's affections -- Ned was older than both Peter and Betty, a working reporter, and presented as the more "stable" option compared to Peter, who of course Betty vastly preferred before circumstances tore them apart. Ned and Betty married in Amazing Spider-Man #156 and jetsetted off to Europe for Ned's job. This is where the cracks in the marriage began. Betty later reveals that she felt abandoned by Ned in Europe, to the point where she was able to come back to New York without his immediate notice -- as a woman, it's very easy to read their relationship at this point as being one filled with, if not abuse, then emotional neglect. Betty and Peter have a quick extramarital affair at this point -- Peter has just broken up with Mary Jane and Betty claims she and Ned are separating -- that persists until Ned returns and punches Peter over it.

(ASM #193)

(ASM #229) Betty and Ned reconcile off panel shortly thereafter, but that's pretty far from the end of the story. It's implied that the problems Betty and Ned previously had start to develop again, namely that Betty feels abandoned by Ned, that he is inattentive and, again, as a woman, it's hard not to read it as emotional neglect, if not abuse -- yet. Betty does start another affair at this point, this time with Flash Thompson, and Ned starts acting strangely. It would later be retconned that he was suffering the effects of hypnotism by the Hobgoblin, but like I said, that's a retcon, and what was happening at the time was that Ned was acting erratically in part because he was the villainous Hobgoblin. Ned becomes controlling, threatening, and verbally and physically abusive towards Betty.

(ASM #284)

(ASM #283) "I suppose you think it's all right for a wife to cheat on her husband!" "No -- but I won't let you hurt her, either." Leaving aside that Peter also had an affair with Betty, something he's conveniently forgetting in the above panels, I've always really liked this exchange, because the narrative makes it clear through Peter's response to Ned that, whatever the audience may think of Betty for cheating on Ned, it is reprehensible for Ned to publicly humiliate her and/or physically abuse her as a response.

Then Ned Leeds dies in Spider-Man vs Wolverine and he's revealed as the Hobgoblin posthumously shortly thereafter and that remains canon for years and years until it's later retconned out, as comics are wont to do. But that's not really that important for this conversation -- my point being, at one point in Spider-Man canon, it's made fairly clear to the reader that Ned is an abusive husband. He emotionally neglected and abused Betty several times over and physically hurt her at least once on panel, with the clear intent that the reader should realize that he is physically hurting her. So for me as a reader and as a woman, this has always been a really uncomfortable relationship. I have a problem with later Spider-Man comics claiming that it's "not Ned's fault" that he abused Betty because of the retcon that he was hypnotized, and I have a problem with the MCU making Betty and Ned into a cute summer fling in Spider-Man: Far From Home, because I feel like Ned's clear abuse of Betty either gets excused or entirely glossed over. And I don’t think the initial abuse storyline is bad -- I think there’s some amount of value in portraying Betty as a woman who marries too young, who experiences a terrible marriage, and who then spends years recovering from that marriage, which was the case up until they retconned Ned’s abuse of her as a side effect of him being controlled by the real Hobgoblin. What I’m specifically uncomfortable with is the post-retcon attitude that since Ned didn’t really mean to abuse Betty, it’s perfectly fine to portray the relationship in a positive light when even before Ned’s abuse became physical that wasn’t the case. I think that’s ultimately really irresponsible storytelling. As a reader, I’m not against soap opera style storylines -- someone getting impregnated by a cone of their ex-husband seems pretty par for the course. But there’s so much additional context here that I still haven’t entirely processed how I feel about this Betty storyline, except that what I feel isn’t positive.

So yes, I would agree with you when I say I think there’s quite a lot of deception involved in Betty’s pregnancy storyline -- the Ned clone didn’t tell her he was a clone, even though he had full knowledge of that fact, just as he had full knowledge of how badly the original Ned treated Betty over the course of their relationship -- that renders their sexual encounter and Betty’s pregnancy uncomfortable for me as a reader, to put it mildly. I don’t think it’s out of character for the Ned clone, given that he acts much like the original Ned: he’s selfish and controlling, withholding information from Betty to suit his own needs. The tragedy of Ned and Betty isn’t that Ned died, as more recent Spider-Man stories like to portray it -- including this one, where Betty doesn’t have the knowledge that a) the Ned she reunited with was a clone and not the original and b) that that clone later died. (ASM #816.) The tragedy is that writers continue to force Betty Brant into Ned Leeds storylines instead of letting her as a character grow past him, and that the only way Spencer thought to include her, one of the longest running Spider-Man characters, back in the story was to have her appear starry-eyed over carrying the child of (the clone of) her abusive ex-husband, and the tragedy is that nobody writing more recent Betty and Ned interactions seems to realize that Ned was a villain not because he was briefly the Hobgoblin but because of how he treated Betty.

#betty brant #ned leeds #marvel comics #long post/#wednesday spoilers #traincat talks comics #*replies

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dirigma · 2 years ago

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hotd spoilers for 10, tw domestic violence + abuse

condal’s commentary on the choking is so smug about having written a “grey” character capable of dv and wholly without consideration for what it means or does to its target. which is to say that the writer’s room has gleefully undercut rhaenyra’s freedom to move around in her home and the center of her power by having the specter of daemon’s possible violence hang over everything.

i’ve been frustrated with the comparisons to rhea (not a targ, not the wife of his choosing), but i’m now coming around to what this says about the writers’ room. that they have made rhaenyra an analog to rhea shows a shocking disregard for her as a fmc. i can’t stress enough that abuse in the home can mean never knowing how or why the next fist falls. they’ve chosen that for rhaenyra, in an episode w the trappings of empowerment. it colors everything.

this in the aftermath of an extremely traumatic stillbirth and the death of her father, in the running-up to the death of her son. like it hits so empty for me that the show ends on this moment of would-be warmonger cum girlboss rhaenyra. that’s a male fantasy of female strength! and a particularly cynical one given that the show has taken such great care to show how much rhaenyra loves and has loved daemon, only to have this be its endpoint—rhaenyra as ready target for his rage and violence, as an ever replenishing site of trauma. childbirth, assault, loss, her body can take it all on and still arise a girlboss queen! isn’t that feminism? that you should suffer every loss, the man you love will hit you and leave you, but you must and will get up the next day and do your job, business as usual?

this also presents a very bleak vision of masculinity. to the writers, even a husband cannot cede any power to his wife without in some way subjugating her. “oh well this isn’t surprising because daemon is terrible and grey!” asserts the false and insidious dichotomy that a male character either strangles his wife or is ned stark, you can only be a monster or a good man. it’s an absurdly narrow understanding of what an anti-hero is and can be. condal cites various precedents as though part of the fantasy of jaime lannister and oberyn martell wasn’t their devotion to cersei and ellaria sand.

all to say that i’m disappointed! and bereft that this isn’t a larger conversation. violence against women is simply par for the course, no matter that it is the main character, no matter that she is the queen, no matter that it is so thinly and thoughtlessly drawn.

#house of the dragon #hotd spoilers #daemon x rhaenyra #daemyra #daemon targaryen #rhaenyra targaryen #*

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hale-13 · 4 years ago

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Febrile

By Hale13

For the Summer of Whump Day 23 - Sick

“Don’t,” Peter grouses, spitting out the last bit of bile in his mouth in the sink in the men’s restroom at Midtown and pointedly ignoring the look of disapproval both Ned and MJ are giving him in the mirror as he rinses his mouth out and washes his hands.

Words: 2101, Chapters: 1/1 (Complete), Language: English

Fandoms: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)

Rating: Gen

Relationships: Peter Parker & May Parker, Peter Parker & Tony Stark

Characters: Peter Parker, Ned Leeds, Michelle Jones, Tony Stark, May Parker, Helen Cho

TW: Vomiting

Read on AO3 or below the line break.

“Peter,” Ned’s voice is exasperated and he looks irritated. MJ’s face is still (mostly) an indifferent mask but he can see her eyes brows pulling in the way they do when she’s concerned. “This has been going on for three days now,” he complains. “you have got to tell May.”

“Sure don’t,” Peter says, drying his hands off on a scratchy paper towel and trying to surreptitiously blot at his sweaty face before tossing it in the trash.

“You’re an idiot,” MJ tells him with an eye roll and a soft shove of her shoulder. It completely throws off Peter’s limited equilibrium and makes him sway into the wall. Ned’s glare becomes even sharper.

“I’m fine,” Peter tries and even he can hear the lie in his words now. He totally isn’t fine. He’s not fine at all actually. He’s had a fever, vomiting and stomach cramps for going on three days now and he’s just not used to getting and staying sick this long since he got bitten by the spider. A cold or a twenty-four hour hell flu? Sure. Consistent nausea and a low to mid grade fever for seventy-two hours? Unheard of.

“This is pointless,” MJ’s voice is monotone as she tosses Peter his phone which he fumbles, just barely catching it with the tips of sticky fingers.

“When did you take my phone?” He asks confused.

MJ guides him out the door and towards the front office – the exact opposite direction he needs to be going if he’s going to make it to his chemistry class. “I took it from your pocket when you were re-enacting the exorcism. Happy should be here in like ten minutes.”

“MJ,” Peter whines, not putting up a fight when Ned grabs his other arm to help with the pulling and directing. “I don’t need to go home.”

“Yes you do,” Ned’s tone is firm. “No one wants your flu Peter.”

“Alright that’s… fair,” he admits. “But my homework-,”

“We’ll get it for you,” MJ reassures as the office comes into view. She pushes him into one of the chairs sat outside and marches in to speak to the secretary. Peter pouts and crosses his arms. Yeah he feels like shit and he really just wants to sleep and, sure, his lower abdomen is really cramping and hurting but he got shot two weeks ago and the pain isn’t that bad. He can totally handle it. “You’re signed out,” Michelle tells him when she comes back, offering Ned a note to excuse his tardiness. “Let us know that you didn’t die okay loser?”

“Bye Peter!” Ned says brightly, back to his normal self now that he knows Peter is actually going home.

His friends finally gone, Peter drops all pretense and lets his face rest against the cool wall next to him, letting his eyes slip shut in relief – his forehead was burning. He pulled the sleeves of his hoodie over his hands and shivers. Maybe it is good that he goes home. He can take a nap and recuperate and be back at school tomorrow completely better.

Yeah. He just needs to nap.

“Well your scary girlfriend wasn’t kidding,” Mr. Stark’s voice rips Peter out of his near-sleep and has him blotting out of the chair, nearly falling over if he hadn’t caught himself on the way. “You look like shit kiddo.”

“Mr. Stark,” Peter squeaks, surprised at seeing his mentor at his freaking school what the hell. “What uh… what are you doing here?”

“What does it look like?” Tony asks with good humor, looking at Peter over the top of his AR glasses with a concerned smile, eyes scraping over him in a clinical way. “I’m here to get you.”

“Uh no offense, but why?” Peter asks, tripping over his book bag on the floor and falling back into the chair. Tony raises an eyebrow.

“Because I’m one of your emergency contacts,” he answers like this is the most obvious thing ever and Peter blinks a little in confusion. Mr. Stark is one of his emergency contacts? Since when? He opens his mouth to ask this very question when a sudden bout of nausea rolls over him and he, instead, scrambles to his feet and down the hall to the nearest bathroom.

He barely makes it to the sink before he starts gagging and dry heaving, nothing coming up but leaving him feeling dizzy and light-headed. Peter leans his head against the porcelain of the sink with a low moan, gagging again on the end and leaning his face back over the sink to drool out the excess saliva in his mouth.

“Yikes,” he hears Mr. Stark mutter behind him and then a calloused hand is running carefully through his hair and resting on his forehead. Peter pushes his face into the cool palm subconsciously and keeps his eyes closed as he tries to push the nausea down. “Yeah you’re definitely coming back to the MedBay with me.”

Peter lets out a wordless whine but doesn’t protest beyond that. It has been three days of this after all – maybe it is a good idea to consult with a professional?

“Come on buddy,” Tony says as he slings Peter’s arm over his shoulder and starts dragging him out of the bathroom and towards the entrance to the school. “You have a date with Dr. Cho and your aunt is waiting to hear the results of her exam.”

Happy actually looks concerned when Peter sees him standing outside of one of the many town cars Mr. Stark owns and he doesn’t say anything when he takes Peter’s bag from Tony to put in the front seat. The leather of the back seats is cool and the interior is darkened by the tinted windows and Peter lets out a sigh of relief, resting his head against the window; already half asleep.

The drive is, thankfully, quick and Peter dozes through most of it – still nauseous but able to hold it down for the most part. Soon enough they pull into the underground garage of the Tower and Tony is hustling him into the elevator which rockets them up to the MedBay floor without either of them having to say anything.

“May wants you to call her once you get settles,” Tony says, rapidly texting on his phone.

Peter squints his eyes at his mentor. “I’m not sure how I feel about you two texting,” he says.

“Oh we’re besties,” Tony teases, pocketing the phone with a shit eating grin. “We have coffee every other Wednesday.”

“I… don’t know if you’re serious,” Peter says, concerned. He probably doesn’t want to know to be honest. The doors of the elevator trundle open and Tony steers Peter into an empty exam room, directing him to sit on the exam bed. It only takes a second before Dr. Cho bustles in.

“Hey Peter,” she says with a smile as she rubs hand sanitizer into her hands and grabs a set of gloves from the box on the wall. “Tony said you were sick. Want to tell me about what’s going on?

“Nausea mostly,” he says as she runs a thermometer across his forehead and frowns at the readout. “My stomach hurts.”

“Well you have a fever of just over one hundred and two,” she says as she clips a pulse ox reader to his finger and wraps a blood pressure cuff around his arm and lets it run. “And your blood pressure is a little low,” she narrows her eyes at the reading and unhooks the machines. “Lay back for me?”

Peter does and stares at the ceiling as she starts to palpate his abdomen. He could probably fall asleep here actually if he – “OW!” He exclaims, curling away from Dr. Cho’s hands and wrapping his arms around his stomach to protect it.

“Well I have a tentative diagnosis,” she says snapping off her gloves. “We’ll do an ultrasound to confirm but, congratulations, Peter you have appendicitis.”

Peter and Tony both blink and then look at each other and then back. “For three days?” Tony questions, scooting Peter over to sit next to him on the bed and run a hand soothingly up and down Peter’s back. It doesn’t stop the stabbing pain in his abdomen but it helps.

“His healing factor is probably slowing down the progression, preventing it from rupturing as quickly as it could or should have,” she says, typing something into Peter’s chart on her StarkPad. “I’ll have a tech confirm with ultrasound and get a surgeon out to do the surgery. It’s pretty quick – one hour tops and then a few days recovery and you’ll be good as new.”

“Surgery?” Peter asks hoarsely, feeling his heart rate speed up. He’s never had surgery before.

Dr. Cho looks up at him and her face softens a little. “It’s an easy procedure,” she promises. “You won’t even realize that you’ve had it really and. Once you wake up, you’ll feel immediately better. Everything will be fine,” she promises and Peter nods with a gulp. He can feel stomach acid rising in his throat again and lunges for the emesis basin sitting on the bedside table, gagging into it.

“Let it all out Webs,” Tony says, rubbing his back sympathetically. “Got anything to help with this doc?”

“I’ll have the nurses start and IV and give him an anti-emetic,” she said, passing a new basin to Tony and taking the one from Peter’s slack grasp. “Just try to relax okay Peter?”

“This sucks,” he grumbles, letting his head fall over to rest on his mentor’s shoulder and relaxing when he feels Tony’s finger scrub though his hair to massage his aching head.

“Sure does kiddo,” Tony agrees, pulling the blanket up to Peter’s chest. “But at least its an easy fix.”

“I don’t want surgery,” Peter tells him quietly. Even with all of his many Spider-Man injuries he’s never had to be put under for anything. “Is May on her way?”

“Happy went to get her,” Tony promises him. “And surgery seems really scary but its not I promise. It’s like taking a really good nap and May and I will both be there alright? It’ll be fine Underoos.”

“Okay,” Peter says quietly, feeling slightly better but still a little concerned. But he would have May and Tony with him. It would be fine.

————————————————

“Guess we still need to tweak the anesthetic formula for you just a bit,” Mr. Stark says apologetically as he mops up the sweat on Peter’s brow with a damp cloth and supports him as he retches again. The surgery had gone well and had been quick. Waking up however?

Not so much.

“Just let it out baby,” May croons as she rubs his back, sweaty and making the thin hospital gown stick to his skin uncomfortably. Peter just gasps a little and squeezes his eyes closed, trying to take deep breaths through his nose to quell his nausea.

“I’m good,” Peter croaks a minute later, letting his aunt settle him back into the bed and fuss over him. He had barely woken up after the surgery before the vomiting started again. It had alarmed Tony but May and Dr. Cho had both determined that it was just a poor reaction to the anesthesia they used. With how fast him metabolism was, it should move through his system quickly.

“Can I get you anything sweetie?” May asked him, brushing his damp hair out of his face and sitting on the edge of the bed facing him.

“I’m okay,” Peter said, his eyes drooping from exhaustion. Tony squeezed his hand and tucked his blanket in a little tighter around him warming Peter up from the inside a little. He was so glad and thankful that he had the chance to get closer with Tony over the last couple months since the incident with the Vulture. The man was still a little awkward and learning how to be a mentor but he was trying and that’s all Peter could ask for. “Just want to sleep,” he said softly, letting his eyes slip closed.

“Okay baby,” he heard May whisper, running her fingers through his hair and Peter felt the ghost of a smile on his face. Yeah, he could probably handle this recovery.

#summerofwhump #summerofwhump23 #Prompt: Sick #irondad #spider man #Summer of Whump 2021

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rainhalydia · 5 years ago

Note

I wasn't in fandom at the time, so I'm curious about how you felt, as a Throbb shipper, about GRRM confirming Robb didn't love Theon as much as he loved Jon? And how did Throbb shippers in general feel about it?

Well, I can’t say how Throbb shippers in general felt. Not that happy, I’d guess? I can tell how I felt and still feel about it, though I didn’t see that interview until long after the fact so I didn’t catch any drama anyway. To sum it up: I don’t care.

A much longer, rambling word-vomit under the cut:

I think I summed up my feelings very exactly, but I kept thinking a lot about this ask and having lots of opinions, so here we go. I’ll preface this long-ass rant by saying I have no professional training in literary analysis. I just read a lot, overthink everything and had two classes in college about literature.

First of all, this tendency to give great weight - i.e., to care at all - about what writers have to say about their own work is completely foreign to me. I mean it literally - the main framework of literary analysis I’ve encountered throughtout my education was basically centered around the text, and I very much adopt it without even giving it conscious thought. I don’t seek out interviews, addendums, essays, anything at all. Sometimes I read it if they fall on my lap. Such was the case with this interview.

It’s not that writers don’t have things to say, or that those things are not interesting or valuable or sometimes shed a new light on their work. It’s that at the end of the day they’re not important! Only canon is canon. I don’t mean to sound snob or pedantic, like the books are law or something. And any canon has a number of valid interpretations (within limits), they’re not absolute, they allow some wiggle room. But any text needs by definition to stand on its own without writers poking their heads inside the room to say how we should interpret it. If we need imput from the writers to do it, then the text is already bad, it failed, sorry. Interpretation is the reader’s job. In fact, it’s the reader’s prerrogative.

Much of this hipe around authors, I believe, has to do with the rise of social media and how close to the public writers suddenly were. And I feel that applies especially for authors like Martin, who are very talented and have created a very rich world that has become really popular. And ASOIAF is still ongoing. It’s natural that everyone wants to pick at his brain and know where the story is going!

And here I make my second very unpopular point: authors are not specialists in their own work.

He knows more than anyone about it, certainly, and currently Martin is probably the only person who knows how things will end (though we have plenty of bare bones the show left), but he is, as he has admited himself, a gardener. The story was bound to get away from him, given his own writting style. The group of people who will be specialists on his work don’t include him, and they don’t even exist yet. They will only emerge when he’s stopped writing (so probably after his death) and his work has ended (if it was finished or not). Then people can read every single thing he has ever written, which is much more than ASOIAF, and analyse it to death, pick it apart from every single angle, the ones Martin intended to be there and the ones he didn’t.

Again, I don’t mean to come across as snobbish and say Martin does not know his own work, characters, creation, etc. He does! But no writer can leave all their biases behind when they start writing, so these books are not neutral to begin with. Add to it the lots and lots of variables readers will bring when they interpret the text, and any book is always going to be more than the author intends by default.

If my argument seems absurd, let me point out that it has already happened to a certain degree: my own interpretation from reading ASOIAF is that it is full of anti-war, anti-violence messages, and yet from it has sprung an adaptation that, in my own interpretation, glorifies war and violence to a ridiculous degree. I’m not alone in these opinions, btw. They’re pretty common in fandom spaces, so I’m sure I didn’t pull them out of thin air. We can argue until we’re blue in the face that the Ds can’t read anything for shit, they certainly don’t do themselves any favors, but you know, they interpreted the books well enough to correctly guess who was Jon’s mother and get permission to adapt it in the first place. I’ve since seen people (I’m not naming names, anyone still reading will just have to take my word for it, but I swear they do exist) defend that the show is a faithful adaptation of the books and that the glorification of war was there too, and others say that the show didn’t actually glorify war, it had an anti-war message! Who is wrong? Well, I don’t know. As I said, the GRRM’s specialists are yet to come, and I’m certainly not one of them. What I believe, however, is that all of us brought our own biases to the same text, interpreted it according to them, and came to different, often conflicting conclusions.

See also what GRRM said about the partnership between Jaehaerys and Alysanne and what most people made of their relationship from Fire and Blood. See the sept sex/rape scene controversy. See the Dany/Drogo controversy.

Do you get why I put little weight in Martin’s interviews to form my opinion? So given that and my own background, I’ll chose my own interpretation of the text rather than Martin’s apocrypha.

What does the book canon, and the book canon alone, say about Robb’s feelings for Theon? Well, unless new material is released, we’ll just never know for sure, because Robb isn’t a pov character. We do have Theon’s side of things - he has a certain affection for Robb, he’s more of a brother than his own brothers, he wishes he had died with him or at least that he had been there at the moment of Robb’s death, depending on how sincere he feels like being. We also know a little bit of what other characters thought of their relationship. Bran says Robb admired Theon and enjoyed his company, and it’s implied that he finds this baffling. He’s also jealous that Robb spends more time with Theon and other adults doing adult things than with his brothers. And though I’ve talked at lenght about interpretation and wiggle room to understand things, it’s also pretty evident that Robb is down to hear Theon talk about his sexual conquests in some detail as long as his brothers aren’t around.

Of course, Bran is a child and much as he loves Robb, their time together is cut short and Robb is not his main concern anyway. We get most material about Robb and Theon’s relationship from Cat’s pov. There’s a lot we can analyse and Damien had already done a great not-meta about it, but sadly he’s since deleted, thank you to the demons who got on his case, but for me the most damning piece of evidence that Robb feels very strongly for Theon is this:

“Robb will avenge his brothers. Ice can kill as dead as fire. Ice was Ned’s greatsword. Valyrian steel, marked with the ripples of a thousand foldings, so sharp I feared to touch it. Robb’s blade is dull as a cudgel compared to Ice. It will not be easy for him to get Theon’s head off, I fear. The Starks do not use headsmen. Ned always said that the man who passes the sentence should swing the blade, though he never took any joy in the duty.”

So to unpack what is going on: nearly drowing in grief, Cat rambles to Brienne about lots of things, including Theon’s impending death sentence. By Northern dumb tradition, Robb must be the one to behead Theon, his former best friend turned enemy, turned betrayer, turned brother-killer. And she says that it won’t be easy for him to do it.

Now, it can be argued that this is partly because of the sword. They’ve lost their sharp valyrian steel and Robb uses an inferior blade, not as sharp. I reject this interpretation as the only explanation (and here comes my own biases) because she mentions the headsman right after. A headsman might be more experienced, but it’s not like he’d have valyrian steel to do it either. Rather, I think she’s talking about how being able to pass Theon off to be killed by a headsman would be easier on Robb psychologically, but it’s not really an option, so Robb will have to suffer.

At this point, to Robb’s knowledge, Theon has: 1) betrayed his trust and used the ruse of negociations with Balon to escape; 2) attacked the northern shore and enslaved his people; 3) attacked and took control of his home; 4) made his brothers hostages; 5) killed his brothers; 6) denied his brothers the right to be buried in a decent way; and finally, 7) burned their bodies and exposed them for all of the North to see.

And after all this, having to be the one to kill Theon will make him suffer.

We know one of the moments Robb gets the angriest in the books is when Bran is threatened by the wildlings. He is the acting Lord and keeping his little brothers safe is his responsability. He nearly bites Theon’s head off when Theon saves Bran in a risky way and we know that was uncharacteristic because Theon is still sulking about that a whole year later. So his siblings are dear to him, but even after Theon does everything from steps 1 to 4, he’s still sure they’re not in danger and that Theon won’t do anything to them. That’s how much he trusts Theon. It takes literal murder to make him change his mind.

But then he does change his mind. He believes Theon did those awful, awful things to his brothers. After that knowledge has had time to settle in, after he believes the worst of Theon, he has this amazing convo with Cat that I’ll quote whole because it’s amazing:

“Enough.” For just an instant Robb sounded more like Brandon than his father. “No man calls my lady of Winterfell a traitor in my hearing, Lord Rickard.” When he turned to Catelyn, his voice softened. “If I could wish the Kingslayer back in chains I would. You freed him without my knowledge or consent … but what you did, I know you did for love. For Arya and Sansa, and out of grief for Bran and Rickon. Love’s not always wise, I’ve learned. It can lead us to great folly, but we follow our hearts … wherever they take us. Don’t we, Mother?”

Is that what I did? “If my heart led me into folly, I would gladly make whatever amends I can to Lord Karstark and yourself.”

Lord Rickard’s face was implacable. “Will your amends warm Torrhen and Eddard in the cold graves where the Kingslayer laid them?” He shouldered between the Greatjon and Maege Mormont and left the hall.

Robb made no move to detain him. “Forgive him, Mother.”

“If you will forgive me.”

“I have. I know what it is to love so greatly you can think of nothing else.”

Catelyn bowed her head. “Thank you.” I have not lost this child, at least.

So we know that what is going on here is that Robb is buttering Cat up before breaking the news of his marriage to Jeyne to her. One of the possible interpretations supported by the text is that Jeyne is in love with Robb and Robb is not in love with her. It’s a common reading that he married her out of honor and to avoid a possible Jon Snow situation. During their marriage, he seems to grow fond of her - Cat notices he likes her company better, and her brother’s, and that he laughs when he is with the Westerlings - but he also keeps some distance. She’s afraid of Grey Wind, which pretty much means being afraid of a part of him. In turn, he’s attentive, courteous, and a bit touched and annoyed at her public displays of affection.

Then there is this gem:

“His heir failed him.” Robb ran a hand over the rough weathered stone. “I had hoped to leave Jeyne with child … we tried often enough, but I’m not certain…”

And this is more Damien’s not-meta than my own, but once you see it, you can’t ever unsee it. Compare the bolded parts in that quote in the first Cat-Robb convo to the part bolded in the second one, put them side to side and tell me you can’t see the difference. In the first one, Robb basically spells it out that he’s made a mistake out of love, that love turned him into a fool, but it was stronger than him. At that point of the narrative, Robb’s biggest mistake (and notably it was HIS mistale, it was not a case of the narrative screwing him over) was to free Theon. A mistake that caused him to lose his brothers, castle and a significant chunk of political standing. The consequences of marrying Jeyne, which is pretty much only to lose the Freys, don’t even compare - especially because the Stark faction believes they can win their support back.

And this love that made him act like a fool is further described in the second bolded part of that quote. He loved so greatly that he could think of nothing else. That is some passion there, folks. Even considering that he’s trying to get Cat on his side, it strikes me as so sincere and heartfelt. And again, maybe it’s my own biases showing, but that sounds like an all-consuming love, the kind of love that doesn’t go away easily. I don’t see that same depth of emotion on the second bolded quote… they tried often enough. Does it add up with the first part? I don’t think so.

My conclusion, and forgive me if the shipper gogles come in, is that the love that hurt him, that consumed him, is the love he had for Theon. Not for his wife. But it was in the past, one might say. His marriage was just beginning, he and Jeyne grow closer, etc. I’ll quote two more bits:

“I cannot speak to that. There is much confusion in any war. Many false reports. All I can tell you is that my nephews claim it was this bastard son of Bolton’s who saved the women of Winterfell, and the little ones. They are safe at the Dreadfort now, all those who remain.”

“Theon,” Robb said suddenly. “What happened to Theon Greyjoy? Was he slain?”

Here we are nearing the Red Wedding. Some Freys come to pretend to make peace and pressure for a wedding to Edmure and they bring news of the battle of Winterfell. Professional writers don’t often abuse the “suddenly” like us poor fic writers, so when he says it was sudden, i believe it was sudden. I believe it came out of nowhere, in fact, and that Robb was the only one in that room considering Theon’s fate.

Roose Bolton removed a ragged strip of leather from the pouch at his belt. “My son sent this with his letter.”

Ser Wendel turned his fat face away. Robin Flint and Smalljon Umber exchanged a look, and the Greatjon snorted like a bull. “Is that … skin?” said Robb.

“The skin from the little finger of Theon Greyjoy’s left hand. My son is cruel, I confess it. And yet … what is a little skin, against the lives of two young princes? You were their mother, my lady. May I offer you this … small token of revenge?“

Part of Catelyn wanted to clutch the grisly trophy to her heart, but she made herself resist. “Put it away. Please.”

“Flaying Theon will not bring my brothers back,” Robb said. “I want his head, not his skin.”

Aside from Catelyn, who is torn, and maybe the Greatjon (I don’t know what snorting like a bull is supposed to convey), no one in that room approves of torturing Theon, they’re all rightly creeped out. But no one would blink an eye if Robb had ordered Theon flayed alive. Instead, he commands the torture to stop. Of course it’s the only decent thing to do, but let’s all appreciate how the character who is always arguing for peace, end of conflict and letting things go for the sake of the living and what can still be saved instead of more violence, is tempted by it. Robb is the only one who shares the full extent of Cat’s grief here, but he’s also the only one to try and stop the senseless punishment.

I joke all the time about how Throbb is canon, and it’s mostly jokes. They are not canon in the sense that Cat and Ned are canon, and I don’t think we’ll have any more facts added to their story together, there probably won’t be any flashbacks that hint at a romantic relationship between them. But looking at the text alone, what we have of it as of now, it’s possible to support a canonical reading for this ship. This interpretation is there in the text if you want to see it. In fact, some things make more sense if Robb was in love with Theon.

And you know, having a ship be supported by canon is not actually a condition that needs to be met to ship anything. It’s just something I particularly need to get into it. But even if you read Theon and Robb as just friends, it’s a reach to say that Robb didn’t love Theon.

Of course, we have Robb demonstrating affection towards Jon in the books too. He is Robb’s chosen heir, to Cat’s despair. Despite all the negative propaganda bastards get and the fact that the mother he so respected and loved disliked and distrusted Jon, Robb considers him a full brother, to compare to Sansa’s constant “half-brother” from the beginning of her journey. They’re seen having a good time together (they have a horse race in their very first appearance in the books, and Mance recalls them getting into trouble together as children), so they enjoy each other’s company.

Yet there’s also an undercurrent of sibling rivalry between them, seen from Jon’s pov. We have this bit with Benjen:

Benjen gave Jon a careful, measuring look. “You don’t miss much, do you, Jon? We could use a man like you on the Wall.”

Jon swelled with pride. “Robb is a stronger lance than I am, but I’m the better sword, and Hullen says I sit a horse as well as anyone in the castle.”

This is hilarious to me. My uncle paid me a compliment for being perceptive, a skill not at all related to martial skills! Time to compare my martial skills to my brother’s, even though we’re both 14 and there’s lots of more tried warriors in the world and we haven’t even had our last growh spurt! This is sure to impress a seasoned ranger!

Of course we know Jon’s rivalry towards Robb comes from his bastard status, but it’s interesting to me that it’s something that centers around Robb alone; he doesn’t compare himself to Bran or Rickon as far as I remember. That can be explained by their very similar ages and growing up together, I think. Jon has the advantage of being older than his other true born brothers.

Jon also says this:

Bastard children were born from lust and lies, men said; their nature was wanton and treacherous. Once Jon had meant to prove them wrong, to show his lord father that he could be as good and true a son as Robb. I made a botch of that. Robb had become a hero king; if Jon was remembered at all, it would be as a turncloak, an oathbreaker, and a murderer. He was glad that Lord Eddard was not alive to see his shame.

To Jon - and to the other Stark children - Robb is often the model to be emmulated. I won’t dig up all the times they hold him up as the ideal of bravery. Jon’s feelings are not unique in this sense, though they are when it comes to the rivalry. They all admire Robb. From Robb’s side, I don’t remember hints of him admiring Jon or any of his siblings. He certainly loves them, likes them, and enjoys spending time with Jon at the very least.

But Theon is the one Robb admires in text. Bran says it, and Theon too:

“There is nothing small about the letter I bear,” Theon said, “and the offer he makes is one I suggested to him.”

“This wolf king heeds your counsel, does he?” The notion seemed to amuse Lord Balon.

“He heeds me, yes. I’ve hunted with him, trained with him, shared meat and mead with him, warred at his side. I have earned his trust. He looks on me as an older brother, he—”

Readers often dismiss this as Theon’s garden variety empty bragging. To be fair, Theon very much distorts reality in his head to fit his own idea of how things should be, but this is one of the few times when he’s not doing that. He’s genuinely proud that Robb thinks so well of him. And since he’s so sensitive about what people think of him and people not giving him the credit he thinks he deserves, I’m ready to believe his account of facts this one time.

What I get from canon, regarding who Robb loves the most out of Jon and Theon, is that he loves them differently. He might even love Jon more by ASOS; it’s a wonder that we have hints that he still cares about Theon at all by the end, after the murders of who we know are the miller boys, but who Robb thinks are Bran and Rickon.

He had different relationships with them. Even if you reject the reading of Throbb as romantic, friends and siblings are not interchangable, even if you’re out there calling close friends brothers or if your brother is your best friend. It’s different sorts of affection. At the beginning of the series, Robb and Theon seemed closer to me than Robb and Jon - let’s not forget that Jon’s favorite is Arya, and the biggest family drama at that time has to do with Jon and Cat. They grow even closer as they go to war together, and then they’re pushed apart by circumstances and by Theon’s actions.

But okay, this is not long enough yet, so let’s say that this is an invalid framework of analysis and Martin’s word of god has as much weight as canon, and that in fact, we’re 100% certain that Robb loved Jon more than Theon.

Why does it even need to be a competition? No one holds it against Ygritte that Jon loves Arya more. Asha has a steady boyfriend that she’d gladly marry, and still she takes risk after risk for Theon. Ned was probably the greatest love of Cat’s life, but her interactions with her brother and uncle are still emotional and moving in great part because of the depth of her love for them.

Robb loving Jon more doesn’t take anything away from Theon. He doesn’t love Theon less because he loves Jon more, love is not a finite resource. And Robb loved Theon plenty, be it in a familial, friends or romantic way. If it diminished, that was a result of Theon’s choices alone.

#Anonymous #throbb #long post #and i mean long

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timeless-hollywood-classics · 5 years ago

Text

Mae West (born Mary Jane West; August 17, 1893 – November 22, 1980) was an American actress, singer, playwright, screenwriter, comedian and sex symbol whose entertainment career spanned seven decades. She was known for her lighthearted, bawdy double entendres and breezy sexual independence, and often used a husky contralto voice. She was active in vaudeville and on stage in New York City before moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the film industry.

West was one of the most controversial movie stars of her day; she encountered many problems, especially censorship. She once quipped, "I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it." She bucked the system by making comedy out of conventional mores, and the Depression-era audience admired her for it. When her film career ended, she wrote books and plays, and continued to perform in Las Vegas and the United Kingdom, on radio and television, and recorded rock 'n roll albums. In 1999, the American Film Institute posthumously voted West the 15th greatest female screen legend of classic American cinema.

Mary Jane West was born on August 17, 1893, in Brooklyn (either Greenpoint or Bushwick, before New York City was consolidated in 1898). She was delivered at home by an aunt who was a midwife. She was the eldest surviving child of John Patrick West and Mathilde "Tillie" (later Matilda) Delker (originally Doelger; later Americanized to "Delker" or "Dilker"). Tillie and her five siblings emigrated with their parents, Jakob (1835–1902) and Christiana (1838–1901; née Brüning) Doelger from Bavaria in 1886. West's parents married on January 18, 1889, in Brooklyn, to the pleasure of the groom's parents and the displeasure of the bride's parents and raised their children as Protestants, although John West was of mixed Catholic–Protestant descent.

West's father was a prizefighter known as "Battlin' Jack West" who later worked as a "special policeman" and later had his own private investigations agency. Her mother was a former corset and fashion model. Her paternal grandmother, Mary Jane (née Copley), for whom she was named, was of Irish Catholic descent and West's paternal grandfather, John Edwin West, was of English–Scots descent and a ship's rigger.

Her eldest sibling, Katie, died in infancy. Her other siblings were Mildred Katherine West, later known as Beverly (December 8, 1898 – March 12, 1982), and John Edwin West II (sometimes inaccurately called "John Edwin West, Jr."; February 11, 1900 – October 12, 1964). During her childhood, West's family moved to various parts of Woodhaven, as well as the Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods of Brooklyn. In Woodhaven, at Neir's Social Hall (which opened in 1829 and is still extant), West supposedly first performed professionally.

West was five when she first entertained a crowd at a church social, and she started appearing in amateur shows at the age of seven. She often won prizes at local talent contests. She began performing professionally in vaudeville in the Hal Clarendon Stock Company in 1907 at the age of 14. West first performed under the stage name "Baby Mae", and tried various personas, including a male impersonator.

She used the alias "Jane Mast" early in her career. Her trademark walk was said to have been inspired or influenced by female impersonators Bert Savoy and Julian Eltinge, who were famous during the Pansy Craze. Her first appearance in a Broadway show was in a 1911 revue A La Broadway put on by her former dancing teacher, Ned Wayburn. The show folded after eight performances, but at age 18, West was singled out and discovered by The New York Times. The Times reviewer wrote that a "girl named Mae West, hitherto unknown, pleased by her grotesquerie and snappy way of singing and dancing". West next appeared in a show called Vera Violetta, whose cast featured Al Jolson. In 1912, she appeared in the opening performance of A Winsome Widow as a "baby vamp" named La Petite Daffy.

She was encouraged as a performer by her mother, who, according to West, always thought that anything Mae did was fantastic. Other family members were less encouraging, including an aunt and her paternal grandmother. They are all reported as having disapproved of her career and her choices. In 1918, after exiting several high-profile revues, West finally got her break in the Shubert Brothers revue Sometime, opposite Ed Wynn. Her character Mayme danced the shimmy and her photograph appeared on an edition of the sheet music for the popular number "Ev'rybody Shimmies Now".

Eventually, she began writing her own risqué plays using the pen name Jane Mast. Her first starring role on Broadway was in a 1926 play she entitled Sex, which she wrote, produced, and directed. Although conservative critics panned the show, ticket sales were strong. The production did not go over well with city officials, who had received complaints from some religious groups, and the theater was raided, with West arrested along with the cast. She was taken to the Jefferson Market Court House, (now Jefferson Market Library), where she was prosecuted on morals charges, and on April 19, 1927, was sentenced to 10 days for "corrupting the morals of youth". Though West could have paid a fine and been let off, she chose the jail sentence for the publicity it would garner. While incarcerated on Welfare Island (now known as Roosevelt Island), she dined with the warden and his wife; she told reporters that she had worn her silk panties while serving time, in lieu of the "burlap" the other girls had to wear. West got great mileage from this jail stint. She served eight days with two days off for "good behavior". Media attention surrounding the incident enhanced her career, by crowning her the darling "bad girl" who "had climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong".

Her next play, The Drag, dealt with homosexuality, and was what West called one of her "comedy-dramas of life". After a series of try-outs in Connecticut and New Jersey, West announced she would open the play in New York. However, The Drag never opened on Broadway due to efforts by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to ban any attempt by West to stage it. West explained, "The city fathers begged me not to bring the show to New York because they were not equipped to handle the commotion it would cause." West was an early supporter of the women's liberation movement, but said she was not a "burn your bra" type feminist. Since the 1920s, she was also an early supporter of gay rights, and publicly declared against police brutality that gay men experienced. She adopted a then "modern" psychological explanation that gay men were women's souls in men's bodies, and hitting a gay man was akin to hitting a woman. In her 1959 autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It, West strongly objected to hypocrisy while, for surprising and unexplained reasons, also disparaging homosexuality: "In many ways homosexuality is a danger to the entire social system of Western civilization. Certainly a nation should be made aware of its presence — without moral mottoes — and its effects on children recruited to it in their innocence. I had no objection to it as a cult of jaded inverts... involved only with themselves. It was its secret, anti-social aspects I wanted to bring into the sun. As a private pressure group it could, and has, infected whole nations." This perspective, never elaborated upon by Mae West in other books or interviews seems inconsistent with the Mae West persona. In her 1975 book Sex, Health, and ESP, Mae West writes on page 43, "I believe that the world owes male and female homosexuals more understanding than we've given them. Live and let live is my philosophy on the subject, and I believe everybody has the right to do his or her own thing or somebody else's -- as long as they do it all in private!"

West continued to write plays, including The Wicked Age, Pleasure Man and The Constant Sinner. Her productions aroused controversy, which ensured that she stayed in the news, which also often resulted in packed houses at her performances. Her 1928 play, Diamond Lil, about a racy, easygoing, and ultimately very smart lady of the 1890s, became a Broadway hit and cemented West's image in the public's eye. This show had an enduring popularity and West successfully revived it many times throughout the course of her career. With Diamond Lil being a hit show, Hollywood naturally came courting.

In 1932, West was offered a contract by Paramount Pictures despite being close to 40. This was an unusually late age to begin a film career, especially for women, but she was not playing an ingénue. She nonetheless managed to keep her age ambiguous for some time. She made her film debut in Night After Night (1932) starring George Raft, who suggested West for the role. At first she did not like her small role in Night After Night, but was appeased when she was allowed to rewrite her scenes.[45] In West's first scene, a hat-check girl exclaims, "Goodness, what beautiful diamonds", and West replies, "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie." Reflecting on the overall result of her rewritten scenes, Raft is said to have remarked, "She stole everything but the cameras."

She brought her Diamond Lil character, now renamed "Lady Lou", to the screen in She Done Him Wrong (1933). The film was one of Cary Grant's first major roles, which boosted his career. West claimed she spotted Grant at the studio and insisted that he be cast as the male lead. She claimed to have told a Paramount director, "If he can talk, I'll take him!". The film was a box office hit and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. The success of the film saved Paramount from bankruptcy, grossing over $2 million, the equivalent of $140 million today. Paramount recognizes that debt of gratitude today, with a building on the lot named after West.

Her next release, I'm No Angel (1933), teamed her with Grant again. I'm No Angel was also a box office hit and was the most successful of her entire film career. In the months that followed the release of this film, reference to West could be found almost anywhere, from the song lyrics of Cole Porter, to a Works Progress Administration (WPA) mural of San Francisco's newly built Coit Tower, to She Done Him Right, a Betty Boop cartoon, to "My Dress Hangs There", a painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Kahlo's husband, Diego Rivera, paid his own tribute: "West is the most wonderful machine for living I have ever known – unfortunately on the screen only." To F. Scott Fitzgerald, West was especially unique: "The only Hollywood actress with both an ironic edge and a comic spark." As Variety put it, "Mae West's films have made her the biggest conversation-provoker, free-space grabber, and all-around box office bet in the country. She's as hot an issue as Hitler."

By 1933, West was one of the largest box office draws in the United States and, by 1935, West was also the highest paid woman and the second-highest paid person in the United States (after William Randolph Hearst). Hearst invited West to San Simeon, California. "I could'a married him", West explained, "but I got no time for parties. I don't like those big crowds." On July 1, 1934, the censorship of the film Production Code began to be seriously and meticulously enforced, and West's scripts were heavily edited. She would intentionally place extremely risqué lines in her scripts, knowing they would be cut by the censors. She hoped they would then not object as much to her other less suggestive lines. Her next film was Belle of the Nineties (1934). The original title, It Ain't No Sin, was changed due to the censors' objections. Despite Paramount's early objections regarding costs, West insisted the studio to hire Duke Ellington and his orchestra to accompany her in the film's musical numbers. Their collaboration was a success; the classic "My Old Flame" (recorded by Duke Ellington) was introduced in this film. Her next film, Goin' to Town (1935), received mixed reviews, as censorship continued to take its toll in eroding West's best lines.

Her following effort, Klondike Annie (1936) dealt, as best it could given the heavy censorship, with religion and hypocrisy. Some critics called the film her magnum opus, but not everyone felt the same way. Press baron and film mogul William Randolph Hearst, ostensibly offended by an off-handed remark West made about his mistress, Marion Davies, sent a private memo to all his editors stating, "That Mae West picture Klondike Annie is a filthy picture... We should have editorials roasting that picture, Mae West, and Paramount... DO NOT ACCEPT ANY ADVERTISING OF THIS PICTURE." At one point, Hearst asked aloud, "Isn't it time Congress did something about the Mae West menace?" Paramount executives felt they had to tone down the West characterization or face further recrimination. This may be surprising by today's standards, as West's films contained no nudity, no profanity, and very little violence. Though raised in an era when women held second-place roles in society, West portrayed confident women who were not afraid to use their sexual wiles to get what they wanted. "I was the first liberated woman, you know. No guy was going to get the best of me. That's what I wrote all my scripts about."

Around the same time, West played opposite Randolph Scott in Go West, Young Man (1936). In this film, she adapted Lawrence Riley's Broadway hit Personal Appearance into a screenplay. Directed by Henry Hathaway, Go West, Young Man is considered one of West's weaker films of the era, due to the censor's cuts.

West next starred in Every Day's a Holiday (1937) for Paramount before their association came to an end. Again, due to censor cuts, the film performed below its goal. Censorship had made West's sexually suggestive brand of humor impossible for the studios to distribute. West, along with other stellar performers, was put on a list of actors called "Box Office Poison" by Harry Brandt on behalf of the Independent Theatre Owners Association. Others on the list were Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Astaire, Dolores del Río, Katharine Hepburn and Kay Francis. The attack was published as a paid advertisement in The Hollywood Reporter, and was taken seriously by the fearful studio executives. The association argued that these stars' high salaries and extreme public popularity did not affect their ticket sales, thus hurt the exhibitors. This did not stop producer David O. Selznick, who next offered West the role of the sage madam, Belle Watling, the only woman ever to truly understand Rhett Butler, in Gone with the Wind, after Tallulah Bankhead turned him down. West also turned down the part, claiming that as it was, it was too small for an established star, and that she would need to rewrite her lines to suit her own persona. The role eventually went to Ona Munson.

In 1939, Universal Studios approached West to star in a film opposite W. C. Fields. The studio was eager to duplicate the success of Destry Rides Again starring Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart, with a comic vehicle starring West and Fields. Having left Paramount 18 months earlier and looking for a new film, West accepted the role of Flower Belle Lee in the film My Little Chickadee (1940). Despite the stars' intense mutual dislike, Fields's very real drinking problems and fights over the screenplay, My Little Chickadee was a box office hit, outgrossing Fields's previous film, You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939) and the later The Bank Dick (1940). Despite this, religious leaders condemned West as a negative role model, taking offense at lines such as "Between two evils, I like to pick the one I haven't tried before" and "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"

West's next film was Columbia's The Heat's On (1943). She initially did not want to do the film, but after actor, director and friend Gregory Ratoff (producer Max Fabian in All About Eve) pleaded with her and claimed he would go bankrupt if she could not help, West relented as a personal favor. Censors by now, though, had curtailed the sexual burlesque of the West characterization. The studio had orders to raise the neck lines and clean up the double entendres. This was the only film for which West was virtually not allowed to write her own dialogue and, as a result, the film suffered.

Perhaps the most critical challenge facing West in her career was censorship of her dialogue. As on Broadway a decade before, by the mid-1930s, her risqué and ribald dialogue could no longer be allowed to pass. The Heat's On opened to poor reviews and weak performance at the box office. West was so distraught after the experience and by her years of struggling with the strict Hays censorship office, that she would not attempt another film role for the next quarter-century. Instead, West pursued a successful and record-breaking career in top nightclubs, Las Vegas, nationally in theater and on Broadway, where she was allowed, even welcomed, to be herself.

After appearing in The Heat's On in 1943, West returned to a very active career on stage and in swank clubs. Among her popular new stage performances was the title role in Catherine Was Great (1944) on Broadway, in which she penned a spoof on the story of Catherine the Great of Russia, surrounding herself with an "imperial guard" of tall, muscular young actors. The play was produced by theater and film impresario Mike Todd (Around The World in 80 Days) and ran for 191 performances and then went on tour.

When Mae West revived her 1928 play Diamond Lil, bringing it back to Broadway in 1949, The New York Times labeled her an "American Institution – as beloved and indestructible as Donald Duck. Like Chinatown, and Grant's Tomb, Mae West should be seen at least once." In the 1950s, West starred in her own Las Vegas stage show at the newly opened Sahara Hotel, singing while surrounded by bodybuilders. The show stood Las Vegas on its head. "Men come to see me, but I also give the women something to see: wall to wall men!" West explained. Jayne Mansfield met and later married one of West's muscle men, a former Mr. Universe, Mickey Hargitay.

When casting about for the role of Norma Desmond for the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder offered West the role. Still smarting from the censorship debacle of The Heat's On, and the constraints placed on her characterization, she declined. The theme of the Wilder film, she noted, was pure pathos, while her brand of comedy was always "about uplifting the audience". Mae West had a unique comic character that was timeless, in the same way Charlie Chaplin did. After Mary Pickford also declined the role, Gloria Swanson was cast.

In subsequent years, West was offered the role of Vera Simpson, opposite Marlon Brando, in the 1957 film adaptation of Pal Joey, which she turned down, with the role going to Rita Hayworth. In 1964, West was offered a leading role in Roustabout, starring Elvis Presley. She turned the role down, and Barbara Stanwyck was cast in her place. West was also approached for roles in Frederico Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits and Satyricon, but rejected both offers.

In 1958, West appeared at the live televised Academy Awards and performed the song "Baby, It's Cold Outside" with Rock Hudson, which brought a standing ovation. In 1959, she released an autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It, which became a best seller and was reprinted with a new chapter in 1970. West guest-starred on television, including The Dean Martin Show in 1959 and The Red Skelton Show in 1960, to promote her autobiography, and a lengthy interview on Person to Person with Charles Collingwood, which was censored by CBS in 1959, and never aired. CBS executives felt members of the television audience were not ready to see a nude marble statue of West, which rested on her piano. In 1964, she made a guest appearance on the sitcom Mister Ed. Much later, in 1976, she was interviewed by Dick Cavett and sang two songs on his "Back Lot U.S.A." special on CBS.

West's recording career started in the early 1930s with releases of her film songs on shellac 78 rpm records. Most of her film songs were released as 78s, as well as sheet music. In 1955, she recorded her first album, The Fabulous Mae West. In 1965, she recorded two songs, "Am I Too Young" and "He's Good For Me", for a 45 rpm record released by Plaza Records. She recorded several tongue-in-cheek songs, including "Santa, Come Up to See Me", on the album Wild Christmas, which was released in 1966 and reissued as Mae in December in 1980. Demonstrating her willingness to keep in touch with the contemporary scene, in 1966 she recorded Way Out West, the first of her two rock-and-roll albums. The second, released in 1972 on MGM Records and titled Great Balls of Fire, covered songs by The Doors, among others, and had songs written for West by English songwriter-producer Ian Whitcomb.

After a 27-year absence from motion pictures, West appeared as Leticia Van Allen in Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (1970) with Raquel Welch, Rex Reed, Farrah Fawcett, and Tom Selleck in a small part. The movie was intended to be deliberately campy sex change comedy, but had serious production problems, resulting in a botched film that was both a box-office and critical failure. Author Vidal, at great odds with inexperienced and self-styled "art film" director Michael Sarne, later called the film "an awful joke". Though Mae West was given star billing to attract ticket buyers, her scenes were truncated by the inexperienced film editor, and her songs were filmed as though they were merely side acts. Mae West's counterculture appeal (she was dubbed "the queen of camp"), included the young and hip, and by 1971, the student body of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) voted Mae West "Woman of the Century" in honor of her relevance as a pioneering advocate of sexual frankness and courageous crusader against censorship.

In 1975, West released her book Sex, Health, and ESP (William Allen & Sons, publisher), and Pleasure Man (Dell publishers) based on her 1928 play of the same name. Her autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It, was also updated and republished in the 1970s.

Mae West was a shrewd investor, produced her own stage acts, and invested her money in large tracts of land in Van Nuys, a thriving suburb of Los Angeles. With her considerable fortune, she could afford to do as she liked. In 1976, she appeared on Back Lot U.S.A. on CBS, where she was interviewed by Dick Cavett and sang "Frankie and Johnny" along with "After You've Gone." That same year, she began work on her final film, Sextette (1978). Adapted from a 1959 script written by West, the film's daily revisions and production disagreements hampered production from the beginning. Due to the near-endless last-minute script changes and tiring production schedule, West agreed to have her lines signaled to her through a speaker concealed in her hair piece. Despite the daily problems, West was, according to Sextette director Ken Hughes, determined to see the film through. At 84, her now-failing eyesight made navigating around the set difficult, but she made it through the filming, a tribute to her self-confidence, remarkable endurance, and stature as a self-created star 67 years after her Broadway debut in 1911 at the age of 18. Time magazine wrote an article on the indomitable star entitled "At 84, Mae West Is Still Mae West".

Upon its release, Sextette was not a critical or commercial success, but has a diverse cast. The cast included some of West's first co-stars such as George Raft (Night After Night, 1932), silver screen stars such as Walter Pidgeon and Tony Curtis, and more contemporary pop stars such as The Beatles' Ringo Starr and Alice Cooper, and television favorites such as Dom DeLuise and gossip queen Rona Barrett. It also included cameos of some of her musclemen from her 1950s Las Vegas show, such as the still remarkably fit Reg Lewis. Sextette also reunited Mae West with Edith Head, her costume designer from 1933 in She Done Him Wrong.

West was married on April 11, 1911 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Frank Szatkus (1892–1966), whose stage name was Frank Wallace, a fellow vaudevillian whom she met in 1909. She was 17. She kept the marriage a secret, but a filing clerk discovered the marriage certificate in 1935 and alerted the press. The clerk also uncovered an affidavit in which she had declared herself married, made during the Sex trial in 1927.

In August 1913, she met Guido Deiro (1886–1950), an Italian-born vaudeville headliner and star of the piano-accordion. Her affair, and possible 1914 marriage to him, as alleged by Diero's son Guido Roberto Deiro in his 2019 book Mae West and The Count, went "very deep, hittin' on all the emotions". West later said, "Marriage is a great institution. I'm not ready for an institution yet."

In 1916, when she was a vaudeville actress, West had a relationship with James Timony (1884–1954), an attorney nine years her senior. Timony was also her manager. By the time that she was an established movie actress in the mid-1930s, they were no longer a couple. West and Timony remained extremely close, living in the same building, working together, and providing support for each other until Timony's death in 1954.

West remained close to her family throughout her life and was devastated by her mother's death in 1930. In 1930, she moved to Hollywood and into the penthouse at The Ravenswood apartment building where she lived until her death in 1980. Her sister, brother, and father followed her to Hollywood where she provided them with nearby homes, jobs, and sometimes financial support. Among her boyfriends was boxing champion William Jones, nicknamed Gorilla Jones (1906–1982). The management at her Ravenswood apartment building barred the African American boxer from entering the premises; West solved the problem by buying the building and lifting the ban.

She became romantically involved at age 61 with Chester Rybinski (1923–1999), one of the muscle men in her Las Vegas stage show – a wrestler, former Mr. California, and former merchant sailor. He was 30 years younger than she, and later changed his name to Paul Novak. He moved in with her, and their romance continued until her death in 1980 at age 87. Novak once commented, "I believe I was put on this Earth to take care of Mae West." West was a Presbyterian.

In August 1980, West tripped while getting out of bed. After the fall she was unable to speak and was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, where tests revealed that she had suffered a stroke. She died on November 22, 1980, at the age of 87.

A private service was held at the church in Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills, on November 25, 1980; (the church is a replica of Boston's Old North Church.) Bishop Andre Penachio, a friend, officiated at the entombment in the family mausoleum at Cypress Hills Abbey, Brooklyn, purchased in 1930 when her mother died. Her father and brother were also entombed there before her, and her younger sister, Beverly, was laid to rest in the last of the five crypts less than 18 months after West's death.

For her contribution to the film industry, Mae West has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1560 Vine Street in Hollywood. For her contributions as a stage actor in the theater world, she has been inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Mae West among hundreds of artists whose material was destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.

#mae west #golden age of hollywood #classic hollywood #classic cinema

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kitten1618x · 6 years ago

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GoT Afterthoughts ep. 08x01 ‘Winterfell’ (Part 1)

Whew! I’m sorry this has taken so long. I’ve got two munchkins home from school with a stomach bug, and they’ve been cutting into my rewatch and write-up.

So, a few things before we kick this bad boy off... I have not read or interacted much with anyone (except writing up that post yesterday about the opening creds) and I have avoided the discord server (even though I’m DYING to gush) as to not skew my own perception of the episode. Those of you who follow my blog know that I am partial to political!jon, but here’s your heads up for anyone else that just stumbled onto this recap. And with that...

We begin the journey of our last season similarly to the way we began our very first: An excited Winter Town boy frantically scrambling to find a better view of the royal retinue marching on Winterfell—complete with the same musical score. Let’s call that strike one against Jon and Dany, as we all know what a farce that first royal couples’ relationship was.

This boy, as he shimmies up a nearby tree, very much reminds me of a combination of both Arya and Bran in the pilot — Arya even spies him and smiles, as she stands watching with the smallfolk (a nice book nod). Her face at initially seeing her big brother Jon makes my heart skip a few beats, and I kind of got the feeling she was going to call out for him, but changed her mind. She looks down then, and I’m honestly so worried for their reunion because they have both changed so much, and Arya isn’t the same little girl he remembers.

Her smile fades as Jon and Dany pass her by, and the Hound comes into view. Her feelings with Sandor have always been complicated, but we don’t have much time to dwell on that, because Gendry rounds the corner and there’s a different kind of smile lighting up Arya’s face now—and I’m so stoked for their reunion, because it’s what I deserve. WE ALL DESERVE THIS OKAY?!?!?!

And what do we have here? Ahhhh yes, the typical D&D ‘cock’ and/or (in this case) ‘balls’ banter via Varys and Tyrion as they once again travel together in another wooden box. You know, we damn well better get the payoff to the jackass/honeycomb/brothel joke this season, or I swear by the old gods and the new that I’m blowing up the Sept of Baelor... oh wait.

Missandei looks visibly uncomfortable at the impassive stares of the Northerners as they ride by. However, Jon did warn them about the North—which he reiterates to a rather annoyed looking Dany, who no doubt expected a much more warmer welcoming for coming to “save the North”—but it’s pretty clear there will be no Myhsa crowd-surfing here.

A screeching overhead sends the Northerners frantically running for cover as a smug-looking Daenerys smirks proudly at the fear her dragon children instill when they split the skies above. Let’s be real here — that was no coincidence. Remember this?

Dany is in complete control of Drogon, and let’s call a spade a spade: this was a cheap intimidation tactic driven by spite. And I honestly can’t even say I blame the girl, but it’s probably not the best way to make new friends, either—especially when they are all of the mindset that “a Targaryen cannot be trusted”. Just sayin’, Dany girl.

And we have Arya’s reaction to seeing Dragons for the first time as they soar high up over Winterfell and Sansa, who watches from the ramparts. Sansa’s reaction is quite similar to Cersei’s—as in, she really doesn’t have one. Someone please cue My Chick Bad by Ludacris!!

Jon and Dany enter the courtyard and Jon springs from his horse to bring Bran in for a signature Stark squeeze and a forehead kiss (another season one callback). He proudly admires how Bran has grown and is now a man, only for Bran to answer with some vague and emotionless three-eyed raven shit, before staring down Daenerys while Jon moves to Sansa’s open arms.

*Perhaps no one informed Jon about Bran going all sentient-being?

I’m sure most of you already noticed that while this is supposed to be the same hug scene we were shown in the HBO teaser, it’s not the same shot, nor the same angle. In the teaser, Jon makes this soft face and goes straight to Sansa’s arms...

But in the actual episode, Jon goes straight to Bran’s arms, and his expression is quite different...

And in the teaser the hug is much longer in duration, and Sansa doesn’t look up at Dany until the end—still not relinquishing her hold on Jon.

However, in the episode, we get a shorter version and a different angle, while Bran and Sansa simultaneously stink-eye Dany the entire time.

*please note Jon’s expression isn’t the same as it is in the hbo teaser—which begs to differ WHY they chose such a romantic shot of these siblings to hype the final season? I mean, I know why... do you? 😉

Annnnnnd moving right along. Jon asks where his darling baby sister Arya has gotten to, as to which Sansa replies “lurking somewhere” — which is an odd response, but I’m not gonna lie, it did make me chuckle a little. If I had to make a guess on this odd dialogue (other than the D’s just suck at dialogue sometimes), I imagine it serves the purpose of leading Jon to assume that the girls still have the same strained relationship of their youth.

Not one to stand by idle while getting eye-fucked from all directions (and not in a good way), Dany sashays over to be introduced to the stunning redhead Jon was hugging on, to learn she is (only) his sister (whew!), and the Lady of Winterfell. And with that said, I need to take a moment to address something to all the antis who will probably hop on this post (cuz I know y’all are there): Jon is NOT the Lord of Winterfell. Winterfell does NOT belong to him, not even as warden of the North, not even a little bit. He has no say, no ownership, no NOTHING on Winterfell. The only way he becomes the Lord of Winterfell is if he marries his cousin, Sansa Stark — which is just ONE of the many reasons WHY a marriage between them is advantageous. Tell your friends.

The tension kicks up a notch as the introductions proceed and Dany feeds Sansa platitudes of how beautiful she and the North are. Perhaps her words are meant to be kind, but after all she’s been through, Sansa is not here for the bullshit — remember how nice Miranda was in the beginning too? Besides, my girl’s jealousy is so thick, she’s almost GREEN. So, giving Dany a full-bodied once over, she haughtily replies “Winterfell is yours, Your Grace.”

Annnnnnd...

Before a full-blown catfight ensues, Bran throws some ice on the situation—and by ice, I mean ice dragon (harr harr harrrr). The wall has come down, and your dragon is one of them now, he informs Dany—whom of course is horrified by the news. (And probably by Bran too, as I assume she, like Jon, did not get the Bran is the 3ER memo).

We move into the Great Hall where we learn that Sansa has already made the intelligent decision to call all their banners to retreat to Winterfell as soon as they knew that the wall had fallen. Little Ned Umber isn’t really sure whom he’s supposed to address or how (bless his little heart), but in any event, he’s getting the horses and carts he needs to safely bring the rest of his people back to Winterfell. Jon tells the maester to summon the Nights Watch as well.

And of course you know little Lady Mormont has some shit to say. She’s not pleased with the turn of events and wastes no time voicing her opinion and stirring the ire of the Northerners. But hey,

(Sorry, I couldn’t help myself).

But more on that later, because Jon looks really nervous as little Lyanna throws shade — and his first instinct is to turn and share a look with his sister, errr wife, cousin!, Sansa.

I feel like he was looking to her for support, but she’s got none to offer at the moment. So, he pulls himself together and tries to calm the dissent by giving another rousing ‘we need allies and I brought them’ speech, and he actually says something VERY interesting here: “I had a choice: keep my crown or protect the north. I chose the north.” I mean, he ain’t lying, and the best place to hide something is right in plain sight, after all—and of course nothing about that statement sounds political or off at all, does it? I mean, because the Dany stans/jonerii insist that Dany agreed and was FULLY onboard to come north before Jon bent the knee, so why would he say that, then? Go on, tell me...

Tyrion decides to throw in his unwanted .02 — simultaneously backing up Jon and feeding Dany’s savior complex (the greatest army blah blah blah — gods, I cannot wait until everyone sees how useless the dragons will be against the NK, especially when using them to roast the wights puts their own soldiers at risk). His words aren’t met with any gratitude when he also drops the bomb that another enemy house of the North is also on its way to Winterfell.

Sansa is taken aback but recovers quickly. Armed with her signature snark, she asks how they’re expected to feed the ‘worlds greatest army’ — something she did not prepare for — chased by a sassy, “what do dragons eat, anyway?”

But wa-wa-wait, HOLD UP. Did Dany just— Did she just throw down the gauntlet?

Why, I believe she did, my friends! jskslkdlsksjsklslsljsllsl 😂😂😂😂

I can’t even with this episode, guys. It’s like I’m watching a medieval version of Melrose Place (google it, youngin’s) with Jane and Sydney throwing shots by the poolside!

Okay, okay, but all joking and snark aside, Sansa has got a valid point. She isn’t prepared to feed all these extra mouths PLUS two fucken huge dragons. I mean, winter is here, and where could they possibly find enough food to sustain everyone? It’s almost as if the show is making it a point to remind us about the lack of food and where did we last see wagons loaded with food? Oh right, I remember...

Put this one behind Northern Independence on the list of ‘Petty Things That Won’t Matter Because the AotD is Coming’ — you know, because who needs food to survive? And who the hell wants independence, anyway?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Moving right along, and holy mother, maiden and crone, this is getting long and I’ve barely scratched the first 15 minutes of the show!

You know what? Nevermind, I’m just gonna go ahead and publish this, and post the rest tomorow when I finish it — I know y’all are thirsty anyway. lol Forgive the sloppiness, as I did this ALL on mobile, and my paragraph breaks kept disappearing and arrrrrghh tumblr!

*Some gifs/images mine. The others were taken from google. Thanks if it’s yours!!

#got afterthoughts #got s8 #jonsa #political!jon #anti jonerys #anti targaryen restoration #anti daenerys #(not really but just being safe)#melissa rants #long post

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davidmann95 · 6 years ago

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Spidey’s leaving the MCU. Thoughts?

It’s been fascinating watching the discourse evolve in real time from “This is terrible” to “If you’re bummed about this it means you tacitly endorse Disney consuming all of culture” to “hey, Into The Spider-Verse somehow managed to escape Sony, so why should we think this will end up like their last 3 live-action Spider-Man movies that were clearly considered far higher-priority than that and treated as such just like this will be?” to “this is definitely all a negotiation tactic”. Given the last time word about a possible MCU-Sony deal pertaining to Spider-Man that Sony was cool on leaked the public outcry got them to turn around and make a deal within 3 months, I’m thinking the latter is probably more likely than not, but by no means guaranteed.

So in principle, in pure abstract principle, if it goes through, it doesn’t have to be a failure. Spider-Man being removed from the MCU doesn’t have that gigantic a reverberation through it because Spider-Man himself is a bit player in-universe, and even if I’ve been right and Norman Osborn was planned as the villain for a Secret Invasion/Dark Reign Phase 4 arc, he could easily be replaced with the likes of Ezekiel Stane. Far From Home could easily work as a final coming to terms with and farewell to those elements on Peter’s end, given one of its big messages ends up “don’t be Iron Man, be Spider-Man”; with him on the run and presumably disavowed by S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers, and Happy no longer seeing Aunt May, a third Spidey flick wouldn’t have to contort itself too horrifically to make internal sense as a direct sequel to the previous two without directly mentioning Stark or the other superheroes. The initial report says Jon Watts is staying onboard as director, and even if they want to shoehorn Venom in that could play out reasonably enough given, again, Peter’s on the run and would need to take what help he could get. Spider-Man and Venom vs. Kraven could be a perfectly decent movie without a single reference to Ant-Man. It could really even work *better* than way without having to wrestle with any involvement with the larger universe, or pressure to conform to house style.

In practice, if it happens, it’s probably going to be a fucking nightmare. The reasons for which are best represented by this guy:

Presumably even as we speak, devoted method actor Jared Leto is breaking into a bloodbank to greedily gobble up a pint of O negative previously bound for a children’s hospital in preparation for his performance as Morbius, the living vampire. Alongside Venom 2, whatever’s up with those Black Cat and/or Silver Sable movies, Sinister Six, and goddamn Nightwatch, ‘Sony’s Marvel Universe’ proceeds apace, and now they get to actually use the centerpiece character as they please to lend this all an air of legitimacy rather than desperate scrambling with a gaggle of hopeless D-listers. And does anyone - anyone - truly imagine Sony’s Spider-Man movie is going to be allowed to meaningfully center around anything but servicing the theoretical franchise? Because if so I want nothing more than to meet you and pick your brain to see how someone still believes in the inherent decency and dignity of man as powerfully as you, you sweet summer child.

So yeah, if this goes through it’s gonna be at best a deeply compromised movie in service of a bad idea. How does it all end up? I think in large part, it might actually lay in Tom Holland’s hands. Probably this is a dumb suggestion - there’s contracts and him probably wanting to ride out his biggest meal ticket and the studio egos that clearly played more of a role in this than money in the first place - but could Holland just threaten to walk if this goes through? Because this is a weird, specific situation where that threat would have tremendous leverage in a way it normally wouldn’t.

If Hugh Jackman had left halfway through Fox’s X-Men and they’d had to recast, or RDJ after Age of Ultron, that’d have been a tremendous blow to those series, but because it was a shared universe there still would have been all the surrounding major players and narrative architecture to let fans know it was the same thing they hopefully already liked. If Holland leaves however, it’s not that Spider-Man Disney set up for them anymore. Without the connection to the MCU, his face would be basically the one remaining major signifier to the public (sorry MJ/Ned, I’m talking Captain America-level ‘major’) that this is the Spider-Man they already really liked to the tune of a billion dollars. If they have to recast it wouldn’t even matter whether or not they formally rebooted, because even if they continued directly from where Far From Home left off, to the world at large this immediately becomes just another Amazing-style cash grab not affiliated with anything they like, an X-Men/DCEU second-tier super-franchise and one that screwed them out of better Avengers movies down the line to boot, and Sony would loose…hundreds of millions, I imagine? So yeah, leverage. And if Holland realized he had it and has an agent or manager or whatever who gives decent advice I have to imagine he’d use it: worst-case scenario they boot him, he goes out on a high note and already has other projects lined up like Uncharted rather than lashing his burgeoning career and reputation to a sinking ship. Best-case he gets more Avengers paydays plus substantially higher-grossing solo movies after all.

So as I see it, four potential outcomes, in what I’d consider order of likelihood:

1. This is all grandstanding and everything’s gonna be back to normal next month.

2. Holland stays, Spider-Man: Homeless performs substantially below what Sony was somehow hoping for in spite of everybody’s best efforts because these are the same genius producers behind Amazing plus now the mastermind behind X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and it returns to Marvel with its tail between its legs in time for Peter Parker to swing into Avengers 6 and ask where everybody was when he was getting framed for mass murder.

3. Holland threatens to bail, factions within Sony realize how much they stand to lose here by severing the rebuilt positive public association that’s the entire basis for how they think they can make this work - without that they’re back at square one where they reached out to Marvel in the first place - cooler heads prevail and a new deal is struck.

4. Holland’s bluff is called or the idiots who wanted this in the first place can him of their own accord because they think they can and should make a complete fresh start work. A new Spider-Man is cast, and while realistically the movies blow there’s less pressure to reverse this due to the cleaner break; unless there’s a boda-fide total flop Spidey remains out of the MCU’s grasp for the foreseeable future. Until Disney just flat-out buys Sony, to be clear.

So I think pretty much however you slice it this ends with Spider-Man still in the mix, albeit he may be going on hiatus from the big leagues for a bit; there’s some poetic irony there about him leaving just as the FF and X-Men arrive, the MCU stymied at the last from finally getting all their IP under one umbrella. Though I don’t know that I’d exactly count this as any sort of anti-corporate victory when either way Disney still gets all other Spider-Man stuff and merch sales that any movies will still drive, and either way Sony gets Spider-Man filmwise, so the only major outcome is we just might be stuck with shittier movies. A somewhat serious question if it goes through though: would all future editions of Infinity War have to have Holland edited out of the box art because they’re not allowed to advertise Spider-Man anymore, and likewise Iron Man scrubbed from the covers for Homecoming? Will reissuings of Homecoming/Far From Home have to have the MCU precredits montage taken out (meaning no more orchestral reaction of the 60s theme in them!)? I guess Disney has some experience in this sort of area with Who Framed Roger Rabbit so they’ll have protocols, but presumably when they lay it out to the head of Sony he’ll laugh at Marvel for having the hubris to try and advise them or thinking they have any say on the matter, and then turn around and immediately step on a rake.

#Spider Man #MCU #Tom Holland #Sony Pictures #Opinion

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hopelesstvaddict · 6 years ago

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Hi do you think jonsa was only d&d creations because they have romanticised other pairs as compared to their book counterpart? Do you think Sansa will able to soothe the beast in Jon in books after Resurrection or jonsa happening in book?

Hi !

To he honest I kind of doubt that D&D came up themselves with Jonsa given what we know about them and the image they project regarding the quality of their story. However I'm not one to dismiss people like that just because their creation is flawed.

There are things they indeed created for the show but it was always based on something from the books they wanted to adapt (characters like Talisa for example) So if indeed they created Jonsa it was based on something from the books. I don't think they intentionally set them up romantically - although the amount of tropes and imagery pertaining to romance is a bit puzzling - but they did build up their relationship at least on a siblings level, that's for sure. So that means that in the books, Jonsa is meant to happen at least on a siblings level. Jon and Sansa are meant to reunite at some point and they will likely wage war together to retake Winterfell. So their relationship will be explored in the books as well on some level. That is a certainty now. Now the question is on which level.

By this point in the books Jon has died and the show has confirmed he's going to be resurrected. Now in the show Sansa arrives at the Wall pretty much soon after whereas in the books she is still in the Vale so it's possible Jon leaves the Wall and they meet up elsewhere or Jon stays and she arrives later. But they will meet up. Show!Jon was upset and shaken with his death and resurrection but we all agree that it will be more violent for Book!Jon given the magical aspects that the show eluded. If Jon indeed survives because he wargs into Ghost then yeah it's possible that Sansa will help Jon find himself again. But that is already a given in my opinion. I can't see the point of reuniting a wild Jon with his long lost sister if it's not to give him a purpose again. On this, the show has already adapted its own version with Sansa giving Jon a reason to live and to fight again. A more literal example - though I don't know if it was intentional or not - is when Jon beats Ramsey to death but stops short when he sees Sansa. The crew has already commented on this scene and the fact that Jon has lost his humanity there and become a beast/monster. Sansa stops that. She gives Jon back his humanity.

Now if we're talking Jonsa in romantic terms that's another thing. There's enough foreshadowing in the books to support the theory and enough context to see why it would make sense for the overall story. There's also enough visuals now in the show to logically and legitimately think that they support what transpires in the books. But given what we know about D&D it kind of jeopardizes everything because we can't be sure they did this and that on purpose or just got lucky. It seems weird that all these scenes that could be read romantically were all kept in but we can't put it past D&D to have let them in and not realized it was setting a potential romance they did not intend. Perhaps they just reused romantic shots that worked for a woman and a man before - Robb/Talisa, Jon/Ygritte, Jaime/Brienne, Sam/Gilly (yeah that's pretty much all the couples) - that they liked and used them for Jon/Sansa without realizing that Jon and Sansa weren't supposed to be a couple. Oops. But then if we're going that way why not use the same shots for Jon/Daenerys? Oops.

Basically since the show ended like it did, with only the big main storylines finished but all the details and subtleties left out, the speculation can go on. Martin has said the show and the books would roughly have the same general ending. That means that in the books Jon will also team up with Daenerys and that it will end in disaster. That much is confirmed. What the show didn't really conclude are the characters' personal wishes. The journeys, they did finish but at the cost of their life dreams. Or rather it left it open-ended. Sansa's dreams of marriage and motherhood are now left for her future. Jon's dream of a peaceful life is now left for his future. I believe the books will be more complete in that regard especially with Sansa whose storyline basically revolves around marriages and the suffering that stems from each of them before she (temporarily) sheds it to fight for the North. If we're talking about a satisfying ending, she's meant to marry for love and experience a happy motherhood while also leading the North politically and ending up Queen in the North. Or a combination of these. But it would be a bit anti climactic if she completely abandoned those dreams of having a husband and children. The show did not state that she did set those wishes aside, it just implied that she would eventually do it later on.

One thing that the show did here in its ending is that it didn't close any doors. It left everything open. Fans have speculated for a long time who would be the final love interest of Jon and of Sansa. We know now that Dany is not it for Jon. And fans have agreed that Sansa's final partner is not going to be a random character. In the books, she's paired off with pretty much all important male characters - Sandor, Tyrion, Robyn, Theon, Harry the Heir... The show either refused to acknowledge the importance of these relationships or flatly benched them by having the guy killed or Sansa concluding the relationship on her own terms. And proceeded to present ONE relationship that defines Sansa's storylines for the final three seasons. ONE. That hasn't even happened in the books. If Tyrion or Harry or Sandor was the one for Sansa, surely Martin would have told D&D. We can't really be sure that D&D didn't write themselves into a corner and decided that they would diverge on this aspect but in my opinion, Martin told them Sansa's defining relationship would be Jon. Perhaps I'm giving D&D too much credit but I dont think they are the morons the fandom want them so desperately to be. Sure their writing is a bit on the wall and they are things they could have done better. But they ARE writers and producers and they do know how to do things. Maybe they did indeed rush things in the end. But they do know how to write romance - Robb/Talisa, Jon/Ygritte - and they are capable of planting seeds leading up to a big reveal - the Red Wedding for example. Earlier seasons and episodes like Baelor, The Battle of the Bastards, The Winds of Winter are proofs they can do great things if they want. Their script for the series finale was light, yes, but the visual result wasn't and we know that unscripted moments were kept in. These include Jon/Sansa scenes that do nothing to shoot down the relationship whether romantically or not. The directors were D&D themselves and they chose to keep these in. Coming from two guys who, per basically everyone's admission from the cast to the various directors, have exactly in mind what they want to see and won't easily let improvisation or something else than their own vision creep into the final montage, that's kind of huge.

Add all of these with Harington's acting choices. This, we can't really count as a definitive argument for Jonsa. Maybe its just the chemistry he shares with Turner. Maybe that's how they are in real life, maybe it was his own acting choice. But it is still strange that all of these scenes with double-entendre were all kept in by all these different directors/that no one picked up on it if they weren't meant to form an overall entity. And when you start piling up all of these, the acting choices, the sceneries, the unscripted additions, the foreshadowing in the books, all the parallels between Ned/Cat, the fact that Jon and Sansa have been built up for the last three seasons... it kind of becomes a bit big. What was left out really was just the culmination of it all. So that's why my opinion is that for some reason Martin asked them not to spoil everything and just do the strict minimum to complete the general storyline. Maybe in the end it will also amount to nothing. But then it will be really hard to explain.

TLDR : in any case, no I dont think that D&D intentionally created Jonsa, they merely followed Martin's guidelines for the upcoming books. Meaning that strictly on a siblings level, Jonsa will happen in the books. It's a given that Sansa's presence will help Jon especially if he has a problem with his humanity in light of his resurrection. A romance between the two is definitely still on the cards and in any case they will still fare better than Jon and Daenerys in the end.

This got long as I expected. Thanks for the ask !

#jonsa #jon x sansa #sansa stark #jon snow #got #game of thrones #game of thrones analysis #game of thrones meta #game of thrones thoughts #got analysis #got thoughts #got meta #actuallyjonsa #sansa stark meta #jon snow meta #kit harington #sophie turner

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spidercakes · 5 years ago

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Starker for 002 in the ask thing if you wouldn't mind dear author 💜 -StarkerBrain3000

002 | send me a ship and I will tell you:

when of if I started shipping it.

Hard to pinpoint. I saw it probably just after Civil War for the first time, thought ‘hmm’ and then watched the massive backlash to it appear. Never paid much attention to it, though, mostly because starker didn’t sit in any of my inner circle of blogs I follow at the time, so most of it was peripheral and given the weird amount of hate Tony’s character got I already only followed hella select blogs in the MCU fandom.

I got way more into the ship about 3 months ago though. Went on a reading binge and then made this blog. I’m not sure why it happened to be when it was, but I’m already established as a fic writer elsewhere and felt a bit burnt out. This pairing has been like a nice vacation because I like producing content for it and this is a surprisingly interactive fandom? The most interactive I’ve ever dealt with anyway.

my thoughts:

Good lord people on this site take shipping and fiction in general way too seriously. Don’t get me wrong, I live and breath social justice- I have a gender studies degree- its a big part of my life. But antis seem to fundamentally misunderstand how fiction affects reality and how reality affects fiction. They remind me a lot of anti porn feminists in the 70′s claiming that porn made men violent towards women when that’s A- not definitively proven even now and B- you don’t watch an hour long porn flick and become a misogynist, you were already misogynistic and then the porn reaffirmed your shitty values, and the shitty treatment of women in the porn was because misogyny already existed in mainstream culture and was thus included in the porn. Which is generally how fiction affecting reality works- something preexisting in the culture is reinforced by mainstream media and then reabsorbed by the audience, which is why people can watch slashers without you know, turning into one.

And the fact that antis remind me of that particular group of feminists doesn’t leave me with a high opinion of them really. They lack a lot of critical thinking skills, don’t even seem to understand how fan fiction works also, and they also keep redefining the definition of pedophilia for... fuck knows what reason because it sure shit isn’t to help victims of actual CSA. They’re irritating at best and absolute hypocrites at worst- like who the hell says ‘save the children, kill yourself’ and thinks that’s actually acceptable?

As for the ship itself I’ve always preferred AUs, and this pairing is no exception though I’d never actually write it in canon. Canon sideways maybe, but it’d have to be pretty sideways for me to consider it. Plus I find it more fun to make my own sandbox to play in rather than the writers of the MCU’s box. I’ve already seen them in that setting, I want to play with them in new settings lol. That said I’ve not written much of this pairing before so its all new stuff and this particular fandom offers new tropes to play around with! That’s what had me most excited walking into the fandom, the way people toyed with the characters.

What makes me happy about them:

The unique dynamic they have- I’ve always been drawn to characters who have an interesting dynamic. Plus Tony Stark is one of my fav characters in anything anyway and I ship him with almost everyone (minus Pepper, no hate to Pepper!). I figure that’s why this ship came about too- Tony is interesting and well drawn out as a character, and I loved Tom Holland’s Spidey. He’s the best who’s had the character in my opinion so pairing them together was probably something inevitable. Other than that I like the way the fandom toys with their characters- not always in character, but still a lot of fun to read and imagine!

What makes me sad about them:

Well, half of them are dead, so...

things done in fanfic that annoys me:

Good god, daddy kink. Its not even that I find it annoying, its just that its a hell of a squick for me so its difficult to find something that doesn’t include that and surprise daddy kink is not where I’m at as a person. Granted most people warn for it, which I’m grateful for, but it does permeate the fandom in a way that makes it a pain in the ass to find something I want. And honestly that’s really only it, and its more of a personal preference (seriously, no hate to anyone who likes that- you’re clearly all in good company lol, its just not for me) than an actual annoyance.

things I look for in fanfic:

I’m really picky about how I like Tony written. I’ve been writing the character for years now and fell into my own habits with him, though I do get pretty consistent compliments on how I write him so I’ll assume I do an okay job. But the result is that I have a hard time when people write him in ways I don’t like or wouldn’t write myself. Sometimes its just random squicks that pop up in a story, or sometimes I outright dislike the way he’s written. That said I do find that the starker fandom does the things I hate with Tony’s characterization in fic much less.

This, I think, is primarily due to the fact that he’s made the more dominant one in the relationship always (and people treating top/bottom like its a fucking dominance thing is something that annoys me in general mostly because its built on the misogynistic idea that being penetrated is being dominated but also because sex positions aren’t a fucking personality trait but I digress). As per my previous rant I don’t care for the idea of the ‘top’ being the dominating one based on that alone, but I do like that people writing Tony in that way reduces the amount of Wuss Tony fics in the fandom. Actually, I don’t think I’ve read a single one like that. Its my Number One I Hate That in other MCU pairings, making Tony some weak little waif in need of protecting. Though I gotta admit I don’t care for Peter in that position either- clearly he’s capable and able, please don’t turn him into the wuss. Bonus points if everyone thinks he’s soft but then oh no he’s actually dangerous shit lmao.

Still though, my pickiness over how the character is written can sometimes hinder my ability to enjoy a fic.

My kinks:

Bro finding an entire fandom who likes feminizing dudes if fucking mint. I have my issues with the term, but I do feel men get the ass end of the stick when it comes to aesthetics and the easiest solution is to stick them in aesthetically pleasing shit and if that’s women’s clothing and lingerie so be it lmao. I also like the kind of gender bending that goes on in that too, I find it subversive in a way that doesn’t need to be spoken aloud if I want to swing it that way, or flat out more pleasing to imagine. Seriously, men’s clothing is boring as fuck so skirts? I’m here for it. Though I wish there was more fem!Tony stuff in the starker fandom- its actually something I write a lot of when I write him in other pairings (particularly winteriron).

Other than that I’m a big fan of anything sensation play related. So ice play, things fucking about with heat, sometimes electric play stuff, taking away someone’s senses (blind folds, bondage, blocking out hearing in some way- that type of thing). Things like feathers are nice too. I’m also fond of gags, preference for ball gags or impromptu cleave gags. Theoretically soft dom stuff though I will never understand why bondage is considered not terribly kinky. I know a lot of people are into it but the idea of trusting someone enough to tie me up and actually listen if I decide I want out of it? I have too many trust issues to relate lmao. But it does make for a good bit of fiction as I’m sure some of you have noticed in my writing (given that I do love to write some kinky stuff). If you want something sex related specifically for whatever reason public sex gets my goat, not sure why because if I were a random passerby I’d be pretty fucking annoyed at the people in the bathroom but hey, whatever floats your boat on the page, right lmao.

I’ve thought about some more extreme things too, knife play and toying with things like fear being two of those things. But I’d have to have the right opportunity and context to work them in.

Who I’d be comfortable them ending up with, if not each other:

Well, Tony is dead so. I would have preferred him with literally anyone but Pepper though. He literally had more romantic chemistry with Rhodey (who I do incidentally ship him with). But the MCU is bunch of cowards so clearly they would never end up together. But they’d make a better pairing than him and Pepper, in my opinion.

Peter I’m fine with him being with MJ, I like them together on screen and I really like her character. If not her than Ned would also be a good pairing for him!

My happily ever after for them:

Well we gunna have to unkill some people but that’s what fanfic is for, right? Beyond that because I prefer AUs so much their happily ever after will depend entirely upon what universe I’ve imagined up for them :)

#spider answers

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antialiasis · 6 years ago

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Be More Chill

Well, some people seemed game!

So Be More Chill is a musical, based (kind of loosely, as I understand it) on a YA novel by Ned Vizzini. It was originally staged in 2015, but its soundtrack and audio bootleg went on to be rediscovered by Tumblr a couple years later, amassed a disproportionately large fandom, and eventually the show got restaged and is now headed to Broadway next year. I listened to the soundtrack and audio bootleg after just generally getting curious with how much it was being talked about while I was obsessing over Groundhog Day. A bunch of the songs were very catchy, so I listened to the soundtrack a fair bit.

This musical is about a high school boy, Jeremy Heere, who is an unpopular loser at school but wishes he weren't. He has one best friend, Michael (and they're pretty cute and I friendship it), and they spend their time playing video games, smoking pot and looking forward to college, when guys like them will be cool (or, at least, that’s what Michael is trying to convince Jeremy of). One day, one of the school bullies, Rich, takes Jeremy aside and explains to him that he used to be a loser, too - but everything turned around when he got a "Squip". The Squip is an illegal super-advanced Japanese nanotechnology quantum supercomputer (surprise science fiction in this high school drama) in the form of a pill that implants itself in your brain and will communicate with you and instruct you on what to do to be cool. Despite his skepticism, Jeremy shells out $400 for a Squip of his own, which at first makes him supernaturally successful at social interactions but eventually, unsurprisingly, turns out to be evil and planning to implant Squips in the entire school.

This may be one of very few works of fiction that I actually like better when regarded as a metaphor for real-world issues than when taken literally. Usually, while I obviously acknowledge the presence of metaphor and am fine with stories that have a metaphorical layer to them, I'm just personally not very interested in fiction as metaphor. The main reason I care about fiction is because I care about the actual imaginary people being presented and their imaginary lives and thoughts and relationships and the imaginary worlds they live in; I don't particularly care about how it maps onto the real world. Part of the issue is also that I think very often fictional metaphors for real-world issues just aren't very good metaphors; a lot of the time they create false analogies that are misleading if you try to apply the logic of the story to the real-world issue. (For instance, the mutants in X-Men are a metaphor for marginalized groups such as the LGBTQ+ community - but because mutants have actual superpowers that often do literally make them a danger to others, the anti-mutant villains in X-Men kind of have a point, in a way that anti-LGBTQ+ people in the real world don't.) They might be great stories about grappling with serious issues in fascinating hypothetical scenarios, but these hypothetical scenarios tend to not actually be directly analogous to the real-world issues, and ultimately I just usually find the exploration of the hypothetical scenarios themselves more interesting than the kludgy effort to map the story's logic onto something in the real world that's similar but not quite the same.

On the literal level the plot of Be More Chill is pretty clichéd, the characters are fairly stereotypical, and there's nothing terribly compelling about evil supercomputers wanting to take over the world. I like Jeremy and Michael's friendship, and it's pretty funny, and a lot of the songs are great. But I found as I listened to the soundtrack repeatedly that I enjoyed it more if I pretty much just thought of it as a story about teenage insecurities, which I’m presuming is intended as the metaphor behind it. The Squip is unpleasant and mean-spirited from the start, breaking Jeremy down: Everything about you is so terrible, he sings; Everything about you makes me wanna die. Later, Jeremy repeats it after him, quiet, small, defeated: Everything about me is just terrible. Everything about me makes me wanna die. As an evil supercomputer, the Squip is kind of boring, obviously evil from the beginning and has boring evil takeover plans. But the Squip is really a metaphor for insecurity and self-loathing, that insidious voice in your head that tells you everything about you is terrible and nobody will like you unless you change who you are, and while that's nothing new or unprecedented, I think this musical does a nice job of portraying that voice as the toxic, abusive force that it is, maintaining it's just helping you and being realistic while systematically tearing you down in the most insidious way. It's obviously not a perfect analogy: the Squip can predict future happenings, it's a separate malicious entity with an agenda hard to analogize to any internal voice, and the entire thing about being able to drink Mountain Dew Red to turn it off obviously doesn't apply. But the inner voice that tells you Everything about you is so terrible? It's evil, and that should always have been a red flag, and maybe you shouldn't listen to any analogous voice either.

(Also, you can temporarily disable it with alcohol but that doesn’t solve anything in the long term, which does slot pretty nicely into the metaphor.)

At the end, Jeremy realizes the Squip is evil, reconciles with Michael and decides to be himself; in the final song of the show, he admits he's still got voices in his head, the voices of everyone around him telling him what to do, and even the voice of the Squip is still there despite the Squip having been deactivated (because self-doubt never entirely goes away)... but now, Of the voices in my head, the loudest one is mine. Being able to ignore the still-lurking Squip is fine, I guess, but there's a lot more poignancy to that line when it's about the sorts of voices that are in everyone's heads, the looming expectations and doubts and self-criticism, which should always be drowned out by the voice that is simply you, your own will and beliefs and feelings.

(It's definitely to some extent just the bit about how I'm not that interested in the sci-fi hypothetical part here, though.)

#be more chill #ramble #review #ish #metaphors

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rhyswritesdbhgarbage · 7 years ago

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A Work In Progress: Part One

((Yeah, the title is a pun. That's who I am. If you like this hit me up with some likes or requests or anything honestly)

It was a terrible job, but you loved every minute of it. You hated seeing the torn apart, barely functioning, sometimes practically demolished androids standing in your workroom as you clocked in for the day. But you loved fixing them.

It was a childhood dream, working on robots. You grew up and went to college for it. And now, here you are, working at one of Detroit's many subsidiary Cyberlife repair shops. Not one actually owned by Cyberlife, of course, those places take years of experience to get into. You just work at one that used to be a Starbucks… or maybe a cell phone store? You can't exactly recall.

You push open the door and the small bell attached to the doorframe announces your arrival.

“It's not too heavy a workload today [Y/N]!” Kyle, the store owner, shouts from his office, “If you finish up early, you could take off?”

“Sounds like a plan, Kyle,” you say as you unlock your workroom and grab the customer forms out of the folder on the wall.

“Really? Two complete breakdowns and you think it's an easy day,” you mutter to yourself. You set your bag down in the chair at the desk and turn to face the wall of horrors that awaits you. There are three androids, and you make your assessments quickly.

One with a simple optical issue; pop out the eye unit, pop in a new one, call to collect. That will be done in no time. You read her file and then slide it into her hand. You try to ignore how small it is compared to your own. It's easier to stay focused this way. Don't think of them as people and it makes your job easier. Or at least less painful.

The other two though… they might take a lot longer. They look like they've been to Hell and back. One literally has scorch marks on his arms, metal exposed through the melted flesh. The other might have fallen down some stairs? You doubt it was an accident. They come with gyroscopes built in for balance. No reason an android falls unless someone intends it to. You place the respective papers near their feet and head to the parts room.

The parts room is clean and orderly, how you arranged it, with a new shipment package laying next to the door. Kyle doesn't understand how you know which part is which, and you've told him multiple times that you just match the serial number on the part to the serial number on the drawers, and that they are sorted alphabetically, but he either doesn't care or he's too lazy. You suppose it's the latter.

You open the drawer full of optical units compatible with the YK500 unit. Shifting through the parts, you find one in the matching color and head back into your workroom. The repair is simple, and you turn her back on.

“Hello, little one.” Your voice is delicate, your words soft spoken so as not to frighten her, “Can you run a self diagnostic for me?”

Her LED blinks blue and yellow for some time before she responds, “Everything is in working order, ma’am.”

You nod to her response, “And how did the optical unit get damaged?”

“My brother and I, we were just playing around, and he pushed me. I fell into the corner of the stairs.” She recounts this event with no out of place emotions. Simple and clean. Not traumatized, or angry. “When can I go home?”

“When your parents come to pick you up dear,” you grab the file and dial the number into your landline on the desk. No one answers, so you leave a brief message. “Looks like it'll be a bit. Do you want to stay on while you wait?”

The android peeks around the corner into Kyle's office and waves. You know he waves back without even seeing him. “You can hang out in here and I'll call your parents again in a bit, okay?” His voice is also soft. She skips into his office and immediately starts chattering on about the room and her brother. The two of you treat these androids like fellow human beings, which is more courtesy than their owners show them.

A slight noise startles you from thought. You turn to see the HK400 android spark back to life. His LED frantically blinking red.

“Hey, man. Calm down, you're safe.” Instinctively, you raise your arms up towards your chest, a movement fashioned like a peaceful surrender. He was supposed to be off. Why was he on? “My name is [Y/N.] I'm going to repair you. What's your name?”

“They call me… Ned.” The android shifts nervously, his LED never changing from its bright red color. You have seen this before. You hate your job. It blinks yellow briefly, immediately returning to red.

“There are a few damaged parts, some beyond individual repair. Replacements are necessary. I am only able to function at 79% optimum capacity.” He is straight forward despite being alert and alarmed.

You gently reach out a hand towards him, keeping your other hand drawn to your chest, “May I touch you? I need to run my own assessment.” The android nods, yet shifts uncomfortably under your touch. “Looks like you have a faulty thirium pump. This is the wrong unit for your model, they aren't fully compatible. Give me a moment.”

You grab the proper pump from your parts room and return. The HK400 is now sitting in your chair. The other android is gone.

“Where did the PL600 go?” Ned shifts uncomfortably in the chair and his eyes flick over to the set of lockers in the back of your office. “Alright Ned, now I need you to take a deep breath.” You know this is unnecessary, but you know that it relaxes some androids regardless. “Hold it. Now we're going to do that again, but this time I'm going to replace the pump alright?”

Ned nods and breathes in deeply. Your hands move swiftly so as not to disrupt the active flow in his body. Out. And in. Ned's breathing stutters as he exhales. Then it returns to its programming. He is a little bit calmer now, knowing that your intentions are good. “What else needs fixing?”

“I am functioning at 84% now. My thirium supply is still low and my left ear is ringing slightly.”

You grab a pair of magnifying eyeglasses off the desk, as well as a screwdriver. You stare intensely at the back of Ned's auditory input. Pulling it out of his head gently you turn to place it on the desk. Normally, this is the part where you sit down.

“[Y/N], do you require your seat?” Ned starts to stand up from the chair, but your hand on his shoulder stops him from rising

“Not now, Ned. You need it more than I do.” A few twists and turns and the part opens up. A few of the wires are shorted out and you open a drawer on the desk, pulling out new, loose wiring. The process is simple, but it does take its time. You pull out the old wiring, trim the new one, solder it into place on the board and screw it back together. “That should do the trick.”

Ned grabs the part out of your hand and reinstalls it himself. He hums slightly to himself, testing out the hearing. He gives you a thumbs up.

“I am now at 93%, all I need is a resupply and I can head back to my owner.” You pull out a packet from your pocket that you had grabbed in the parts room.

“Let me know if you need more Ned. And please see Kyle before you leave.”

He opens the packet and starts to drink it. You hand him his file from the floor, “take this to Kyle when you see him if you don't mind.”

The folder in his hands looks heavy. It weighs on your conscious that in those papers he is referred to only using numbers. His name is Ned. You force yourself to remember this as he leaves the room and heads into Kyle's office. You hear the door chime and the little YK500 rush past Ned cheering happily for her family's arrival. They seem genuine in their concern for her. You notice Ned’s LED flashing yellow as it tries to process this emotion he is witnessing. He has known nothing similar. Most of the adult models don't. It tears into your heart.

But you have more work to do. Shutting the door to your workroom, you grab the last file of the floor and begin reading. The PL600 was caught outside while running errands by a rowdy group of anti-android protesters with no regard towards their almost human counterparts. You sit patiently at your desk, staring at the lockers.

“I know you know, but my name is [Y/N]. You can come out whenever you're ready.”

There is no noise from the lockers, but you can see the faint light from the android’s LED shining through the cracks. It blinks between yellow and red, almost feverishly, as if he is trying desperately to separate his fear from his need for repair.

Turning around you grab one of the parts on the desk that need repaired and start tinkering with it. This is going to take a while.

After shifting through and repairing two parts, you hear the locker creak open. You turn around slowly so as not to startle thw android.

“[Y/N]? You're… you're good to our kind. Much better than the few humans I have come into close contact with. I appreciate that.”

Our kind? He appreciates that? You have not heard an android speak like this before. He shifts nervously still, removing himself from the locker he hid himself in.

“There are very few people like you in this world. And we need more of you.” He places his hand out for you to take, and you return the gesture, still moving slowly.

“My name is Simon.” His LED flashes yellow, “I just really need this skin repaired. The skeletal structure is merely dented.”

His calm composure after having hidden away from you is almost startling. You begin to wonder if he reverted back to his programming before he speaks up again.

“I may have…” he pauses to find his wording, something most androids do not do, “alternative work for you. It would be on a volunteer basis, as we do not have any money. But there is compassion in you [Y/N] that I have not yet seen in a human.”

You grab a scalpel off your desk and start gently cutting away the melted synthetic flesh. The good thing about the synthetic is that is is self-repairing, but only on minor cuts and scrapes. You stand up and head to the door.

“I just have to get a patch for that. Don't hide from me Simon.”

A slight smile sneaks across his lips as he nods. You leave the room and close the door behind you. As you cross the hall into the parts room, Kyle yells.

“Hey, [Y/N]! The girl was picked up and Ned has paid and left. We only have the PL600 and he sort of wandered in by himself. No one else has come in so I'm going to shut up shop. Just lock the door on your way out, alright?”

“No problem, Kyle!” You respond, having found what you were looking for and heading back into your workroom.

You hear the bell chime one last time as Kyle leaves and locks up. You don't bother shutting the door this time.

“I've been told that this causes some minor sensations, but it's just reconnecting to your system. I know you don't feel pain, but I'm not sure about discomfort, so I figured I would warn you.” You smooth the patch over the metal of Simon's exposed skeleton. He makes a face, almost surprised but then immediately returning to stoic. The LED flashes yellow again. Simon opens his mouth to speak but before he can, you've slipped your bag over your shoulder and put out your hand.

“Don't worry,” you smile, “I'm in.”

“Good,” he shakes your hand, sealing the deal, “We have a WR400 and a PJ500 who need a few repairs. Could you… grab the parts we would need or would they need to be paid for?”

You grab an invoice slip from your desk and note begin noting parts that are compatible with those models, and walk into the parts room, stuffing the necessary parts into your bag. You note the date on the form and sign it, placing it on Kyle's desk.

“I'll have Kyle take them out of my check. If you come to trust him, I'll inquire about expanding our efforts for you.”

Simon nods, “Thank you, [Y/N].”

You both exit the building, the bell chiming behind you as you lock up for the night.

You hate your job.

You love your job.

You just wish this world was kinder.

#dbh simon #dbh fanfic #dbh fanfiction #detroit: become human #detroit become human #dbh #dbh x reader

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